Modern APIs with FastAPI and Python Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: Fastapi vs. x
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One of the questions people always ask is "Which Web framework should I use for building an API? Should I use flask? Should I use Django? Should I
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use Django REST framework?" like, all these different things. So let's take a moment and look at FastAPI versus other frameworks,
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real briefly. Well, the big two have got to be Django and Flask. Django has Django REST framework. Flask has some REST-ful extensions,
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you can add to it. But here's the thing, FastAPI is an API framework first. It's an async framework
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first. It automatically creates documentation with openAPI documentation, all those things. So it's built specifically to be what it is,
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an API framework, where as Django, yes it also does API's, but that's not it's main goal. Flask also does API's,
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but it's not got all that infrastructure there to help you make it go fast. Oh yeah, and both Django and Flask don't fully embrace the async and await
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style programming. At the time of this recording, Django is working on it, Flask has plans that are not really there
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yet. So, if you want a modern API and you're starting from now, you're starting from scratch, your starting
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now, why not choose the most modern framework that has some momentum behind it? We also might compare it to Pyramid or Tornado. Pyramid,
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I love Pyramid. I think it's a great framework, but it does not, and has no plans to, support async as far as I
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know. Also, it's more on the web, less on the API framework side. Pyramid's great.
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There's a lot of things I like about it and I actually created some open source libraries to bring those features that I like about Pyramid to
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FastAPI, but that sort of not exactly the main topic of this course.
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But Pyramid, nice. Tornado, Tornado is interesting because it's one of the few frameworks that embraces the async and await style of programming.
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But FastAPI is the modern version of Python's async. And also there's other specific API frameworks, right? So Django, Flask, all these,
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they're about building Web apps. They can also build API's. Hug,
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for example, built on Falcon, is one of these frameworks that's specifically about building API's. "Embrace the API's of the future",
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the happy Koala hugging bear things says. And Hug is actually nice, but the guy who created Hug actually talked about his
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admiration for FastAPI and how it's really, really special. Let's look at one more aspect of these here.
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Programming is not exactly a popularity contest, but when things are popular, that means there's more momentum behind it,
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there's more other tools to go with it, there's more tutorials and whatnot, so let's just look at the number of GitHub
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stars around each of these. So, Django: 54,000, Flask: 53,000, Pyramid: 3,000, Tornado: 20,000, Hug: 6,000. You look at FastAPI,
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It's at 22, 23,000 right now. What's interesting though, you might say, Well, "it's less popular than Django and flask",
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Yeah, it's only been around a year and a half, and Django and Flask have been around like 10 years.
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So, that tells you a sense of just how popular FastAPI is. It's way popular more than all the other ones below that have been around a while.
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But even for the big hitters, it's like halfway there, 1/7, 1/6 the time it's been around, so really,
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really exciting. There's so much momentum behind FastAPI and I do think it's because of this modern aspect that we've talked about.