Flask-RESTful is the extension for Flask that contains functions and support you'll use to develop REST APIs. Python developers will enjoy the ease and speed of a minimal set up before moving on to explore Flask-RESTful's built-in template library. Using templates as a jumping off point during development is a great way to quickly and easily develop REST APIs, and it has the additional benefit of guiding you to consistently follow API development best practices. In this course, you'll learn to set up your environment to build a RESTful API server. You'll install the Flask-RESTful libraries on Windows and macOS and you'll also work with the CURL command-line utility to make API calls. Next you'll implement a simple API server that responds to HTTP GET requests and then how to configure responses for GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests. Moving on, you'll configure your API server to accept parameters as part of the URL path and send data to your server using the request body in POST requests. Upon finishing this course, you'll be able to configure a simple API server using Flask-RESTful to respond to your HTTP requests.

A major benefit when building REST APIs in Flask-RESTful, is unlimited access to use the built-in request parser any time you want to parse and validate input arguments to your API server. Python developers will find the flexibility and extensibility of Flask-RESTful very useful. In this course, you'll learn to effectively use a request parser object to parse and extract input arguments from user requests. You'll validate input arguments using the right configuration before setting up custom help messages for the parser arguments. Next, you'll examine how your request parser can look beyond the request body - in the query string, cookies, and other locations, for input arguments. You'll explore how to inherit from an existing parser object and how to modify a parser to suit your needs. Finally, you'll investigate how to make errors returned by the parser more user-friendly by choosing to bundle them together to return as a group in a JSON response.

Learn more about Flask-RESTful, which connects to the ORM libraries you use to connect to your database. You'll set up APIs to perform create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. You'll then implement APIs using an in-memory dictionary before integrating them with a MySQL database back end. You'll set up a MySQL database and work with MySQL Workbench. You'll install and use the Advanced REST Client.