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 strategies for deployments and scalability


Flask is a lightweight microframework for the Web. However, as happens with Django, one of the biggest drawbacks related to Flask and Flask-RESTful is that each HTTP request is blocking. Thus, whenever the Flask server receives an HTTP request, it doesn't start working on any other HTTP requests in the incoming queue until the server sends the response for the first HTTP request it received.

We used Flask to develop a RESTful Web Service. They key advantage of these kind of Web Services is that they are stateless, that is, they shouldn't keep a client state on any server. Our API is a good example of a stateless RESTful Web Service with Flask and Flask RESTful. Thus, we can make the API run on as many servers as necessary to achieve our scalability goals. Obviously, we must take into account that we can easily transform the database server in our scalability bottleneck.

Tip

Nowadays, we have a huge number of cloud-based alternatives to...