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Create a fully fledged, professional API with Flask in Python — Part 1
Professionally and securely allow access to your Python programs — setting up the basics in 6 easy steps
An application without an API is much like a restaurant without waiters. In restaurants you don’t have to communicate with the kitchen and wait for your order to enjoy a meal. In the same way a website doesn’t have to know how to communicate with your database for example. Like a waiter, our API receives an order from our website: ‘I’d like some user statistics with a side of meta data”. The API then checks the order (are you allowed to have that data?), convinces our database (the chef) to cook him up some tasty information, waits for the database to finish and finally returns the data to the website.
Why would you need an API?
An API allows two (or more) services to talk to each other in a decoupled way. The most common example is an API that handles communication between a website and a database. It provides access, convenience, security and extra functionalities. Let’s take a look at look a short example of each of these points.
1. Access
Imagine you’ve created a Python program called pixelcounter.py. It reads an image file…
