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

Summary


In this chapter, we designed a RESTful API to interact with slow sensors and actuators. We defined the requirements for our API and understood the tasks performed by each HTTP method. We set up a virtual environment with Tornado.

We created the classes that represent a drone and wrote code to simulate the slow I/O operations that are called for each HTTP request method. We wrote classes that represent request handlers and process the different HTTP requests, and we configured the URL patterns to route URLs to request handlers and their methods.

Finally, we started the Tornado development server and we used command-line tools to compose and send HTTP requests to our RESTful API, and analyzed how each HTTP request was processed in our code. We also worked with GUI tools to compose and send HTTP requests. We realized that each HTTP request takes some time to provide a response due to the simulation of slow I/O operations.

Now that we understand the basics of Tornado to create RESTful APIs...