There’s an amazing amount of data available on the Web. Many web services, like YouTube and GitHub, make their data accessible to third-party applications through an application programming interface (API). One of the most popular ways to build APIs is the REST architecture style. Python provides some great tools not only to get data from REST APIs but also to build your own Python REST APIs.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn:
- What REST architecture is
- How REST APIs provide access to web data
- How to consume data from REST APIs using the requests library
- What steps to take to build a REST API
- What some popular Python tools are for building REST APIs
By using Python and REST APIs, you can retrieve, parse, update, and manipulate the data provided by any web service you’re interested in.
FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.
The key features are:
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Fast: Very high performance, on par with NodeJS and Go (thanks to Starlette and Pydantic). One of the fastest Python frameworks available.
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Fast to code: Increase the speed to develop features by about 200% to 300% *.
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Fewer bugs: Reduce about 40% of human (developer) induced errors. *
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Intuitive: Great editor support. Completion everywhere. Less time debugging.
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Easy: Designed to be easy to use and learn. Less time reading docs.
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Short: Minimize code duplication. Multiple features from each parameter declaration. Fewer bugs.
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Robust: Get production-ready code. With automatic interactive documentation.
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Standards-based: Based on (and fully compatible with) the open standards for APIs: OpenAPI (previously known as Swagger) and JSON Schema.