Python API Development Fundamentals

Book excerpt: Learn all that's needed to build a fully functional web application from scratch. Key Features Delve deep into the principle behind RESTful API Learn how to build a scalable web application with the RESTful API architecture and Flask framework Know what are the exact tools and methodology to test your applications and how to use them Book Description Python is a flexible language that can be used for much more than just script development. By knowing the Python RESTful APIs work, you can build a powerful backend for web applications and mobile applications using Python. You'll take your first steps by building a simple API and learning how the frontend web interface can communicate with the backend. You'll also learn how to serialize and deserialize objects using the marshmallow library. Then, you'll learn how to authenticate and authorize users using Flask-JWT. You'll also learn how to enhance your APIs by adding useful features, such as email, image upload, searching, and pagination. You'll wrap up the whole book by deploying your APIs to the cloud. By the end of this book, you'll have the confidence and skill to leverage the power of RESTful APIs and Python to build efficient web applications. What you will learn Understand the concept of a RESTful API Build a RESTful API using Flask and the Flask-Restful extension Manipulate a database using Flask-SQLAlchemy and Flask-Migrate Send out plaintext and HTML format emails using the Mailgun API Implement a pagination function using Flask-SQLAlchemy Use caching to improve API performance and efficiently obtain the latest information Deploy an application to Heroku and test it using Postman Who this book is for This book is ideal for aspiring software developers who have a basic-to-intermediate knowledge of Python programming and who want to develop web applications using Python. Knowledge of how web applications work will be beneficial but is not essential.