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

Understanding the tasks performed by each HTTP method


Let's consider that http://localhost:5000/api/messages/ is the URL for the collection of messages. If we add a number to the preceding URL, we identify a specific message whose id is equal to the specified numeric value. For example, http://localhost:5000/api/messsages/6 identifies the message whose id is equal to 6.

Tip

We want our API to be able to differentiate collections from a single resource of the collection in the URLs. When we refer a collection, we will use a slash (/) as the last character for the URL, as in http://localhost:5000/api/messages/. When we refer to a single resource of the collection we won't use a slash (/) as the last character for the URL, as in http://localhost:5000/api/messages/6.

We have to compose and send an HTTP request with the POST HTTP verb and the http://localhost:5000/api/messages/ request URL to create a new message. In addition, we have to provide the JSON key-value pairs with the field names and...