Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Python Web Services - Second Edition

By : Gaston C. Hillar
1 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Python Web Services - Second Edition

1 (1)
By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Python is the language of choice for millions of developers worldwide that builds great web services in RESTful architecture. This second edition of Hands-On RESTful Python Web Services will cover the best tools you can use to build engaging web services. This book shows you how to develop RESTful APIs using the most popular Python frameworks and all the necessary stacks with Python, combined with related libraries and tools. You’ll learn to incorporate all new features of Python 3.7, Flask 1.0.2, Django 2.1, Tornado 5.1, and also a new framework, Pyramid. As you advance through the chapters, you will get to grips with each of these frameworks to build various web services, and be shown use cases and best practices covering when to use a particular framework. You’ll then successfully develop RESTful APIs with all frameworks and understand how each framework processes HTTP requests and routes URLs. You’ll also discover best practices for validation, serialization, and deserialization. In the concluding chapters, you will take advantage of specific features available in certain frameworks such as integrated ORMs, built-in authorization and authentication, and work with asynchronous code. At the end of each framework, you will write tests for RESTful APIs and improve code coverage. By the end of the book, you will have gained a deep understanding of the stacks needed to build RESTful web services.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Writing request handlers


The main building blocks for a RESTful API in Tornado are subclasses of the tornado.web.RequestHandler class, that is, the base class for HTTP request handlers in Tornado. We just need to perform the following tasks to build our RESTful API that interacts with a drone:

  1. Create a subclass of the RequestHandler class and declare the methods for each supported HTTP verb
  2. Override the methods to handle HTTP requests
  3. Map the URL patterns to each subclass of the RequestHandler superclass in the tornado.web.Application instance that represents the Tornado web application

We will create the following subclasses of the RequestHandler class:

Class name

Description

HexacopterHandler

This class processes the HTTP GET and PATCH methods for a hexacopter resource.

LedHandler

This class processes the HTTP GET and PATCH methods for an LED resource.

AltimeterHandler

This class processes the HTTP GET method for an altimeter resource.

Note

In order to set the status codes returned by each method that...