Python REST APIs With Flask, Connexion, and SQLAlchemy

The goal of this article is to show you how to use Python 3, Flask, and Connexion to build useful REST APIs that can include input and output validation, and provide Swagger documentation as a bonus. Also included is a simple but useful single page web application that demonstrates using the API with JavaScript and updating the DOM with it.

The REST API you’ll be building will serve a simple people data structure where the people are keyed to the last name, and any updates are marked with a new timestamp.

This data could be represented in a database, saved in a file, or be accessible through some network protocol, but for us an in-memory data structure works fine. One of the purposes of an API is to decouple the data from the application that uses it, hiding the data implementation details.

Good Programers Worry about Data Structures

“. . . unlike every single horror I’ve ever witnessed when looking closer at SCM products, git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it’s one of the reasons git has been fairly successful. . . .

“I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.”

— Linus Torvalds, https://lwn.net/Articles/193245/

The Flask Mega-Tutorial Part XIX: Deployment on Docker Containers

This is the nineteenth installment of the Flask Mega-Tutorial series, in which I’m going to deploy Microblog to the Docker container platform.

For your reference, below is a list of the articles in this series.