APIs and API Design with Python

Therefore, let’s check if we need to install pip separately or already have it. If this command produces the correct output, we must replace all commands throughout the article to use python3 instead of just python. FastAPI is growing at high speed, with 48k stars on Github, 370 contributors, and more than 3.9k forks. This elegant framework built for high-performance and fast-to-code APIs is not one to miss. When he’s not tinkering with electronics or building Django web apps, you can find him hiking the mountains of Taiwan or brushing up on his Chinese.

• Relational databases allow for the storage and retrieval of data, which is stored in tables.
• It also features community extensions that make it easy to integrate with SQL databases.
• Each framework has pros and cons, so you’ll have to evaluate which works best for your needs.
• Lessons and labs focus on using Python to interact, design, and build APIs for the purposes of scripting automated solutions to complex tasks.
• If the output for these commands includes a version number, Python is installed and available from the command line and you can proceed to the next step.
• For this reason, I do not describe the example APIs here as REST APIs, but instead as web or HTTP APIs.

The first thing that we will do is create a submodule to hold all our entities. Let’s create a model directory inside the cashman module and add an empty file called __init__. The JSON in this request was missing a value for area, so FastAPI returned a response with the status code 422 Unprocessable Entity as well as details about the error. Once flask is installed, save the code in a file called app.py.

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Both Flask and Falcon provide fast ways to prototype a REST API in Python. If you are practicing design-first APIs, you can create mock servers before you write any code.

Most REST APIs use resource endpoints and HTTP methods to help communicate actions. In this first example, let’s create a /companies endpoint and perform a simple GET request to retrieve a list of companies. Throughout web and mobile software, you’ll find APIs to exchange data.

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An application sending requests to the API can check the status code and perform actions based on the result. These actions could include handling errors or displaying a success message to a user. As we can see this version of our API serves a larger number of results, results that are stored in an SQLite database (books.db). When our user requests an entry or set of entries, our API pulls that information from the database by building and executing an SQL query. This iteration of our API also allows for filtering by more than one field. We’ll discuss potential uses for this functionality after examining our code more closely. Right now, users can only view our entire database—they can’t filter or find specific resources.

In the next section, we’ll discuss some guidelines for creating a well-designed API that others will actually want to use. In the last section of the tutorial, we’ll apply these principles to a version of our API that pulls in results from a database. You should see JSON output for the three entries in our test catalog. Flask provides us with a jsonify function that allows us to convert lists and dictionaries to JSON format. In the route we created, our book entries are converted from a list of Python dictionaries to JSON before being returned to a user. First, create a new folder on your computer that will serve as a project folder. This can be in your Desktop folder, but I recommend creating a dedicated projects folder for this and similar projects.

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We also used filter to extract incomes only from the transactions list. This creates a new Country with the JSON you sent in the request.

Each framework has pros and cons, so you’ll have to evaluate which works best for your needs. To this end, in the next sections, you’ll look at a REST API in each framework.

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library built to handle high traffic. It features a non-blocking network I/O that enables numerous simultaneous connections. It is used to create lightweight web application backends and REST API server interfaces with backend business logic. Without documentation, even the best-designed API will be unusable. You should have a section for each resource that describes which fields, such as id or title, it accepts.

You may be wondering why you need to add rest_framework to the applications list. You need to add it because Django REST framework is just another Django application. Django plugins are Django applications that are packaged up and distributed and that anyone can use. This returns the full list of countries in the system, with the newest country at the bottom. In this section, you’ll look at some example HTTP responses for a hypothetical API that manages an inventory of cars. These examples will give you a sense of how you should format your API responses.

REST is similar to SOAP in a sense that you call operations in SOAP and REST just maps those operations to web resources and HTTP methods. IIoT software assists manufacturers and other industrial operations with configuring, managing and monitoring connected devices. A good IoT solution requires capabilities ranging from designing and delivering connected products to collecting and analyzing system data once in the field. Each IIoT use case has its own diverse set of requirements, but there are key capabilities and …

• In this tutorial, we’ll look at two Python API frameworks, as well as a code-free way to create mock servers.
• This section will show you how to build a prototype API using Python and the Flask web framework.
• HTTP methods are declared with specific functions within the class.
• Import flask — Imports the Flask library, making the code available to the rest of the application.
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