Introduction

We are in the internet era, a world where everything is connected. Data flows seamlessly from one place to another. We can get all the information in the world with a few clicks on a website. Take Skyscanner as an example, we just need to put in the date and location of our trips, and it can find us the cheapest flight in a split second; the hero behind the scenes that provides this data is API.

In this chapter, you will learn what a web service, an API, and REST are. We will start by teaching the fundamental concepts of APIs. Then we will look at real-life examples of how different web services (Google, Facebook, and so on) use the REST API.

Finally, we will develop our first simple Python RESTful API using Python. Python is a popular and powerful programming language. Apart from its extensive use in the realm of artificial intelligence, it is also widely used in web application development, big data analysis, web scraping, and process automation. What makes Python excel in so many areas is the extensive number of frameworks available. The frameworks do all the heavy lifting jobs and that allows the developers to focus on the actual application design and development.

In this chapter, you will see how data is encoded and communicated between the frontend and the backend. You will learn technical details about the JSON format, the HTTP protocol, HTTP status codes, and so on. All the development work will be verified and tested using Postman and httpie/curl. We will take you through the whole process of web application development. Not only will you learn the essential aspects of developing a RESTful API, but you will also learn about the thinking process, design, development, testing, and even deployment. This is a journey of learning the complete software development life cycle. Let's embark on our exciting journey now!