Handling stateful REST services

A RESTful server is often called upon to maintain the state of the resources it manages. The canonical CRUD operations map nicely to the HTTP methods available in RESTful processing. There may be POST requests to create new resources, PATCH requests to update those resources, and DELETE requests to remove resources.

In order to properly work with individual resources, unique resource identification becomes important. We'll look into RESTful object identification, before looking at the Flask server design that works with multiple objects.

Designing RESTful object identifiers

Object serialization involves defining some kind of identifier for each object. For shelve or sqlite, we need to define...