Summary

This chapter is essential to familiarize ourselves with FastAPI and understand its basic components. The concept that we can get from this chapter can measure how much adjustment and effort we need to invest into translating or rewriting some existing applications to FastAPI. Knowing its basics will help us learn how to install its modules, structure the project directories, and learn the core library classes and functions needed to build a simple enterprise-grade application.

With the help of our recipe online academic discussion forum application, this chapter showed us how to build different REST APIs associated with HTTP methods using the FastAPI module class and Python def functions. From there, we learned how to capture incoming request data and headers using the local parameters of the API methods and how these API methods should return a response to the client. And through this chapter, we saw how easy it is for FastAPI to capture form data from <form></form> of any UI templates and that is using the Form function. Aside from the Form function, the FastAPI module also has the Cookie function to help us create and retrieve cookies from the browser, and Header to retrieve the request header part of an incoming request transaction.

Overall, this chapter has prepared us for advanced discussions that will center on other features of FastAPI that can help us upgrade our simple applications to full-blown ones. The next chapter will cover these essential core features, which will provide our application with the needed response encoder and generator, exception handlers, middleware, and other components related to asynchronous transactions.