Book Image

Building RESTful Python Web Services

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Building RESTful Python Web Services

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Python is the language of choice for millions of developers worldwide, due to its gentle learning curve as well as its vast applications in day-to-day programming. It serves the purpose of building great web services in the RESTful architecture. This book will show you the best tools you can use to build your own web services. Learn how to develop RESTful APIs using the popular Python frameworks and all the necessary stacks with Python, Django, Flask, and Tornado, combined with related libraries and tools. We will dive deep into each of these frameworks to build various web services, and will provide use cases and best practices on when to use a particular framework to get the best results. We will show you everything required to successfully develop RESTful APIs with the four frameworks such as request handling, URL mapping, serialization, validation, authentication, authorization, versioning, ORMs, databases, custom code for models and views, and asynchronous callbacks. At the end of each framework, we will add authentication and security to the RESTful APIs and prepare tests for it. By the end of the book, you will have a deep understanding of the stacks needed to build RESTful web services.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Building RESTful Python Web Services
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we designed a RESTful API to interact with a simple SQLite database and perform CRUD operations with games. We defined the requirements for our API and we understood the tasks performed by each HTTP method. We learned the advantages of working with lightweight virtual environments in Python and we set up a virtual environment with Django REST Framework.

We created a model to represent and persist games and we executed migrations in Django. We learned to manage serialization and serialization of game instances into JSON representations with Django REST Framework. We wrote API views to process the different HTTP requests and we configured the URL patterns list to route URLs to views.

Finally, we started the Django development server and we used command-line tools to compose and send HTTP requests to our RESTful API and analyzed how each HTTP request was processed in our code. We also worked with GUI tools to compose and send HTTP requests.

Now that we understand the basics of Django REST Framework, we will expand the capabilities of the RESTful Web API by taking advantage of the advanced features included in the Django REST Framework, which is what we are going to discuss in the next chapter.