Chapter 12
Project 3.8: Integrated Data Acquisition Web Service
In many enterprise applications, data is provided to several consumers. One way to do this is to define an API that provides data (and the metadata) for subsequent use. In this chapter, we guide you through the transformation of Project 2.5 schema information into a larger OpenAPI specification. We will also build a small Flask application that provides the core acquire-cleanse-convert process as a web service.
We’ll cover a number of skills in the chapter:
Creating an OpenAPI specification for a service to acquire and download data
Writing a web service application to implement the OpenAPI specification
Using a processing pool to delegate long-running background tasks
This is a bit of a deviation from a straight path of acquiring and cleaning data. In some enterprises, this deviation is needed to publish useful data to a wider audience.
We’ll begin with a description of the behavior of this RESTful API...