A step by step guide creating high performance APIs in Python

In this post, I am going to introduce FastAPI: A Python-based framework to create Rest APIs. I will briefly introduce you to some basic features of this framework and then we will create a simple set of APIs for a contact management system. Knowledge of Python is very necessary to use this framework.

Before we discuss the FastAPI framework, let’s talk a bit about REST itself.

From Wikipedia:

Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, called RESTful Web services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. RESTful Web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of Web services, such as SOAP Web services, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.

What is the FastAPI framework?

From the official website:

FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.

Yes, it is fast, very fast and it is due to out of the box support of the async feature of Python 3.6+ this is why it is recommended to use the latest versions of Python.

FastAPI was created by Sebastián Ramírez who was not happy with the existing frameworks like Flask and DRF. More you can learn about it here. Some of the key features mentioned on their website are:

• Fast: Very high performance, on par with NodeJS and Go (thanks to Starlette and Pydantic). One of the fastest Python frameworks available.
• Fast to code: Increase the speed to develop features by about 200% to 300%. *
• Fewer bugs: Reduce about 40% of human (developer) induced errors. *
• Intuitive: Great editor support. Completion everywhere. Less time debugging.
• Easy: Designed to be easy to use and learn. Less time reading docs.
• Short: Minimize code duplication. Multiple features from each parameter declaration. Fewer bugs.
• Robust: Get production-ready code. With automatic interactive documentation.
• Standards-based: Based on (and fully compatible with) the open standards for APIs(Open API)

The creator of the FastAPI believed in standing on the shoulder of giants and used existing tools and frameworks like Starlette and Pydantic

#fastapi #python #api #programming