Book Image

Mastering Flask

By : Jack Stouffer
Book Image

Mastering Flask

By: Jack Stouffer

Overview of this book

Starting from a simple Flask app, this book will walk through advanced topics while providing practical examples of the lessons learned. After building a simple Flask app, a proper app structure is demonstrated by transforming the app to use a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. With a scalable structure in hand, the next chapters use Flask extensions to provide extra functionality to the app, including user login and registration, NoSQL querying, a REST API, an admin interface, and more. Next, you’ll discover how to use unit testing to take the guesswork away from making sure the code is performing as it should. The book closes with a discussion of the different platforms that are available to deploy a Flask app on, the pros and cons of each one, and how to deploy on each one.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Flask
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 8. Building RESTful APIs

Representational State Transfer, or REST, is a method of transferring information between a client and a server. On the Web, REST is used on top of HTTP and allows browsers and servers to easily communicate by leveraging basic HTTP commands. By using HTTP commands, REST is platform and programming language agnostic, and decouples the client and the server for easier development. This is typically used in JavaScript applications that need to pull or update user information on the server. REST is also used to provide outside developers with a common interface to user data. For example, Facebook and Twitter use REST in their application program interface (API), to allow developers to get information without having to parse the website's HTML.