Building beautiful RESTful APIs using Flask

Modern software is powered by APIs. User facing apps may run in the browser or on mobile platforms, but they almost universally rely on data stored in the cloud. More often then not apps use a RESTful API to exchange data with the server.

In my talk I will demonstrate a technique for developing RESTful APIs using the Flask micro-framework and Flask-Restplus. These powerful tools automate most common tasks associated with API development: validating input, serializing output, routing requests to methods, and turning Python exceptions into machine-readable HTTP responses.

A Flask-Restplus API is fully documented by Swagger which lists all defined endpoints, their query parameters and the format of input and output JSON objects. Swagger generates an interactive UI for selecting options and easily testing queries. Flask and Flask-Restplus provide just enough syntactic sugar to make your code readable, scalable and easy to maintain.

My presentation will give an overview of the features of Flask and Flask-Restplus; I will describe how easy it is to get started and discuss some best practices for building complex APIs using this approach. I will wrap up by briefly mentioning other components of the Flask ecosystem, which give this micro-framework power to match fully-loaded systems such as Django.