APIs and API Design with Python 800-460-2298

If you’re new to Python, consider working through the Programming Historian series on dealing with online sources to familiarize yourself with fundamental concepts in Python programming. You can use the Windows, macOS, or Linux operating systems to complete this tutorial, and those few instructions that are not the same across platforms will be explicitly noted. Python 3, the Flask web framework, and a web browser are required for this tutorial, and installation instructions for all platforms are outlined below. Then you will learn how to integrate the API with the database using both raw SQL queries and with the SqlAlchemy ORM. Postgres is used as the database but everything you learn will be applicable almost any other SQL database. For Flask, there are multiple libraries for automatic Swagger generation, but my favorite is flasgger.

Due to the use of a class, it makes more sense to declare the hard-coded array of companies within the company resource class. The result is the same as our previous example, returning the JSON version of the company list. Pyramid is a Python web framework that is designed to work for making complex, large-scale web applications and APIs. It has various features such as routing, views, authentication, authorization, etc.

Programming Historian

The response above is formatted for readability, so your response will look different. As you can see, these actions map to the standard HTTP methods you’d expect in a REST API. You can override these actions in your subclass or add additional actions based on the requirements https://investmentsanalysis.info/senior-mobile-developer-job-description-salary/ of your API. In get_countries(), you need to use jsonify() because you’re returning a list of dictionaries and not just a single dictionary. In this section, you’ll look at some example HTTP responses for a hypothetical API that manages an inventory of cars.

• You access data from a REST API by sending an HTTP request to a specific URL and processing the response.
• The endpoints listed above represent only one resource in the system.
• It’s a good idea to define what an error response will look like.
• The commands are slightly different if you use the Windows native version of Python.

Lastly, Flask has extensive documentation that addresses everything developers need to start. FastAPI follows a similar “micro” approach to Flask, though it provides more tools like automatic Swagger UI and is an excellent choice for APIs. However, as it is a newer framework, many more resources and libraries are compatible with frameworks like Django and Flask but not with FastAPI. Once a REST API receives and processes an HTTP request, it will return an HTTP response.

API creation resources

On GitHub, the language also shows signs of mass adoption, occupying the second position among the top programming languages in 2021. The APIs created with Falcon have a simple and clean design that makes them lightweight. They also require minimal setup and are easy to test and maintain. FastAPI will automatically create JSON based on the fields in the Pydantic model and set the right JSON data type from the Python type hints. This list contains three instances of Country for the initial countries in the API. Pydantic models provide some great features and allow FastAPI to easily process JSON data.

With just a few lines of code, you are ready to initialize Flask and start using it to create your API. With these options set, curl sends JSON data in a POST request with the Content-Type header set to application/json. The REST API returns 201 CREATED along with the JSON for the new country you added. There’s always a chance that requests to your REST API could fail.

Section 7: Pydantic Models

This code provides information about the results of the request. 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. Apidog automatically generates detailed documentation from your API definitions, which includes request parameters, responses, and endpoints.

• The logical entity is a protocol neutral representation of a response.
• But first, let’s briefly discuss what we mean by a Pythonic API.
• ✅ DO increment (at least) the minor version if the default REST API version is changed, even if there’s no public API change to the library.
• To learn about proper use of databases with Flask once again I recommend that you read my Mega-Tutorial.
• To learn more about securing Python APIs with Auth0, take a look at this tutorial.

Testing, when done properly, increases efficiency and quality in the long run. They also reassure developers when making changes, refactoring, or building new features on existing systems. Swagger is an open-source specification that allows you to describe each element of your API so that any machine or system can interpret it and interact with it. Now that we understand how to name resources, we need to think about actions. There are methods in our APIs that are procedural by nature and are not related to a specific resource, e.g., checkout, run, play, etc. In REST, we called Resource to a first-level data representation.

Pandas 2.0: A Game-Changer for Data Scientists?

We also have many more tools at our disposal to create nice APIs, such as keyword arguments (more on them later). The below resources provide information on useful APIs for researchers in the humanities and social sciences as well as further reading on API concepts. As before, we’ll examine the code more closely once you have it running.

This variable allows you to query for a specific item in your datastore. The id refers to the index in the list related to a specific instance of a programming language resource. This presents a problem once clients can delete items from the datastore. As we can see this version of our API serves a Remote Customer Service Representative Job Description: Salary, Duties, & More CLIMB 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.

It’s easy to make sample calls against your mock API right from the browser. Then you can share them with your team and even connect your server to the frontend before you write any backend code. By contrast, Falcon organizes your API with a separate class for each endpoint. HTTP methods are declared with specific functions within the class. Flask REST APIs do not restrict how you declare your endpoints, but you’ll find it easier if you keep them logically grouped. It uses a class for each resource and connects routes to instances of a resource.