Modern APIs with FastAPI and Python Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: Why FastAPI?

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0:00 Why is there so much excitement around FastAPI?
0:02 Well, let's go through just some of the things that make it special. FastAPI
0:06 is one of the fastest Python web frameworks available.
0:09 In fact, it's on par with the performance of things like Node.js and Go,
0:13 and that's largely because it actually runs on top of something called Starlette,
0:18 a lower level web framework, and uses Pydantic for data exchange and data validation.
0:23 So, when you think FastAPI,
0:25 you can think fast to execute, fast to run.
0:28 But that's not the only fast that matters,
0:30 is it? One of the most important ways to be fast is to create applications
0:34 fast and not spend a lot of time building them.
0:36 So it's also fast to code because FastAPI
0:40 does many of the mundane type of things that you would do in a web
0:43 application, automatically for us, and some estimates have put it the speed of using
0:49 FastAPI over things like Flask and Django at 2 to 3 times faster.
0:54 That's because we can do things like just a API method and say it
0:58 takes some kind of class, one of these Pydantic models,
1:00 and it will automatically look and make sure all the stuff that that class says it
1:04 must have is there, the types the class says it must take are either there or
1:09 automatically convertible to there, so you have a class that's a location,
1:13 it has a city and a state,
1:15 well, it better have a city and a state,
1:17 and those are gonna be strings that can be converted over and so on.
1:20 So a lot of the work around like validation, data exchange, documentation,
1:25 all of that is largely automatic,
1:27 so you're not gonna have to spend time writing that code. Also,
1:31 when you don't write code and stuff happens automatically for you,
1:34 that means you might not be writing bugs.
1:36 So there's also about 40% less chance of an error because you don't have to write
1:41 as much validation and data exchange.
1:43 Also, because of the type hints,
1:45 it deeply embraces this idea of teaching the editors what type of data is being exchanged.
1:50 You're passing rich objects to the API
1:53 methods, all the various parts of the API itself, the framework itself, have
1:57 type hints, so editors know what to do and give you automatic completion everywhere,
2:02 less time in the documentation, less time debugging.
2:05 It's also designed to be easy to use and learn.
2:07 If you know Flask, you will be pretty close to knowing FastAPI
2:10 actually, and there's not a whole lot of code you have to
2:14 write. So not too much to write,
2:15 as well as not too much to learn, less time reading docs,
2:19 also, because of the great editor support. When we create our
2:22 API's, we'll put parameters in there saying "it takes this kind of data, returns that
2:25 kind of data, and it has this type". Because of all the automatic stuff that's happening
2:29 for us, you'll see the framework is actually doing multiple things,
2:32 like ensuring the variable is there, doing automatic type conversion, and so on.
2:36 So again, less code duplication, fewer bugs.
2:39 And, it comes with a production ready web server built on Async and await, so
2:44 you get the highest performance production grade servers,
2:48 you can just drop right into production.
2:50 One of the challenges with building HTTP based API's is there's zero documentation.
2:55 What's supposed to be exchanged? Who knows?
2:57 Just go out there and read the docs and play with it.
3:00 But with FastAPI, it automatically uses what was known as "swagger",
3:03 OpenAPI, to generate documentation for all the API methods,
3:08 what data is exchanged through JSON schema, and things like that.
3:12 So it's really, really nice that we get automatic documentation by simply writing our program.
3:16 Nothing else. So, these are just some of the reasons to be excited about
3:21 FastAPI, and we're gonna explore all of them throughout this course.