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

Designing a RESTful API to interact with a simple data source


Imagine that we have to configure the messages to be displayed in an OLED display wired to an IoT (Internet of Things) device, the IoT device is capable of running Python 3.5, Flask, and other Python packages. There is a team that is writing code that retrieves string messages from a dictionary and displays them in the OLED display wired to the IoT device. We have to start working on a mobile app and a website that has to interact with a RESTful API to perform CRUD operations with string messages.

We don't need an ORM because we won't persist the string messages on a database. We will just work with an in-memory dictionary as our data source. It is one of the requirements for this RESTful API. In this case, the RESTful web service will be running on the IoT device, that is, we will run the Flask development server on the IoT device.

Tip

We will definitely lose scalability for our RESTful API because we have the in-memory data source...