Appbase

Collection of components to make Python web app development easier and more fun.

Problems

Common problems appbase tries to solve

• Need of fetching request arguments
• Way to turn Python functions into HTTP/RESTish APIs
• Error handling and logging
• Input JSON validation
• Input conversion

• User and Role management json APIs

  • Auth
  • Only JSON APIs, no UI pages

• Rate limiting
• Host checks
• Configurable process model (gevent/threads)

Need of fetching request arguments

Usual flask code

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/foo')
def bar():
    arg1 = request.args.get('arg1')
    arg2 = request.args.get('arg2')
    arg3 = request.args.get('arg3')
    do_something()

Above is tedious and is boring.

flask-reqarg

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/foo')
def bar(arg1, arg2, arg3):
    do_something()

Above is much better code.. but do can we call bar() outside web request?

appbase

def bar(arg1, arg2, arg3):
    do_something()

app = Flask(__name__)

http_publisher = appbase.publishers.HTTPPublisher(app)
http_publisher.add_mapping('/bar/', add, ['POST'])

Existing solutions

• flask-reqarg

  • http://jason2506.github.io/flask-reqarg
  • implicit
  • no convertors

• Webargs

  • https://webargs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#hello-webargs
  • needs schema (not jsonschema)

• appbase

  • implicit
  • post/json to args

Ease of creating REST APIs

• No automatic API creation from ORM Model

REST API Creation:

>>> import appbase.publishers

>>> app = Flask(__name__)

>>> rest_publisher = appbase.publishers.RESTPublisher(app)
>>> handlers = (get_all, add_user, get_user, edit_user, delete_user)
>>> rest_publisher.map_resource('users/', handlers, resource_id=('int', 'id'))

Proposals

>>> def foofunc():
>>>     return

>>> foofunc.route = '/some/route'
>>> foofunc.security = {groups: []}
>>> foofunc.schema = {}

>>> http_publisher = HTTPPublisher(app)
>>> fooapi = http_publisher(foofunc)

Tests

Running tests:

# Start fake smtp server
python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:10000
# OR python tests/fakemail.py --port 10000  # saves to .eml file in cwd

# Create your settings.py
cp settings-available/dev.py settings.py

# run tests
nosetests -xv tests