Creating a RESTful API using Flask?

Question

The Flask tutorial site here says that to create a RESTful API, you would write classes that extend restful.Resource, then add them to the API by:

app = Flask(__name__)
api = restful.Api(app)
class HelloWorld(restful.Resource):
    def get(self):
        return {'hello': 'world'}

api.add_resource(HelloWorld, '/')

However, I've looked at quite a few tutorials that all just use functions with the @app.route('/path') decorator that I'm more used to seeing in Flask apps. For example, here, they have:

@app.route('/todo/api/v1.0/tasks', methods=['GET'])
def get_tasks():
    return jsonify({'tasks': tasks})

And here:

@app.route('/')
def api_root():
    return 'Welcome'

What's the difference between using the restful.Resource class and just the decorated functions if any? If there are no differences, what should I be doing by convention to create a RESTful API?

Answer 1

Short answer:

restful.Resource is from a Flask-Restful extension, which is not Flask itself. Miguel's tutorial uses Flask to write a restful interface.

Long answer:

First of all, along with Flask, there are a number of Flask extensions. Although they work together, they are separate packages and are written by individual authors. Flask-Restful is an extension to Flask.

Miguel's tutorial explains how you can make a restful api using Flask by itself.

Flask-Restful with the aim to saving some of us from re-inventing the wheel, promises to turn a custom class(or a custom Python data structure) to a restful web service. Flask-RESTX, a fork of Flask-Restful, auto-generates api documentation with swagger UI.

In addition, Flask also documented the usage of MethodView to allow developers to write their own restful APIs. In parallel, Flask-Restless promises to turn a SqlAlchemy class into a restful web service.

An update(18/07/2016), flask-api turns a function/view into a restful interface and is designed by Tom Christie, the author of django restful framework.

an update(17/03/2021), Flask-RESTPlus does smiliar things as above libraries but it also helps you construct swagger API documentation, which is an extra bonus.

There are many roads to Roma.