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

Managing serialization and deserialization with relationships and hyperlinks


Our new RESTful Web API has to be able to serialize and deserialize the GameCategory, Game, Player, and PlayerScore instances into JSON representations. In this case, we also have to pay special attention to the relationships between the different models when we create the serializer classes to manage serialization to JSON and deserialization from JSON.

In our last version of the previous API, we created a subclass of the rest_framework.serializers.ModelSerializer class to make it easier to generate a serializer and reduce boilerplate code. In this case, we will also declare a class that inherits from ModelSerializer, but the other classes will inherit from the rest_framework.serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer class.

The HyperlinkedModelSerializer is a type of ModelSerializer that uses hyperlinked relationships instead of primary key relationships, and therefore, it represents the realationships to other model...