CherryPy and RESTful web api

Question

What's the best approach of creating a RESTful web api in CherryPy? I've been looking around for a few days now and nothing seems great. For Django it seems that are lots of tools to do this, but not for CherryPy or I am not aware of them.

Later edit: How should I use Cherrypy to transform a request like /getOrders?account=X&type=Y into something like /orders/account/type ?

Answer 1

I don't know if it's the "best" way, but here's how I do it:

import cherrypy

class RESTResource(object):
   """
   Base class for providing a RESTful interface to a resource.

   To use this class, simply derive a class from it and implement the methods
   you want to support.  The list of possible methods are:
   handle_GET
   handle_PUT
   handle_POST
   handle_DELETE
   """
   @cherrypy.expose
   def default(self, *vpath, **params):
      method = getattr(self, "handle_" + cherrypy.request.method, None)
      if not method:
         methods = [x.replace("handle_", "")
            for x in dir(self) if x.startswith("handle_")]
         cherrypy.response.headers["Allow"] = ",".join(methods)
         raise cherrypy.HTTPError(405, "Method not implemented.")
      return method(*vpath, **params);

class FooResource(RESTResource):
    def handle_GET(self, *vpath, **params):
        retval = "Path Elements:<br/>" + '<br/>'.join(vpath)
        query = ['%s=>%s' % (k,v) for k,v in params.items()]
        retval += "<br/>Query String Elements:<br/>" + \
            '<br/>'.join(query)
        return retval

class Root(object):
    foo = FooResource()

    @cherrypy.expose
    def index(self):
        return "REST example."

cherrypy.quickstart(Root())

You simply derive from the RESTResource class and handle whichever RESTful verbs you desire (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE) with a method of the same name prefixed with handle_. If you do not handle a particular verb (such as POST) the base class will raise a 405 Method Not Implemented error for you.

The path items are passed in vpaths and any query strings are passed in in params. Using the above sample code, if you were to request /foo/bar?woo=hoo, vpath[0] would be bar, and params would be {'woo': 'hoo'}.

Answer 2

Because HTTP defines these invocation methods, the most direct way to implement REST using CherryPy is to utilize the MethodDispatcher instead of the default dispatcher.

More can be found in CherryPy docs: http://cherrypy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials.html#tutorial-7-give-us-a-rest

Here is also detailed description on how to send and receive JSON using CherryPy Tools: http://tools.cherrypy.org/wiki/JSON