FastAPI in a nutshell

In Chapter 1, Web Development and the FARM Stack, I already mentioned why FastAPI is our REST framework of choice in the FARM stack. What sets FastAPI apart from other solutions is its speed of coding and clean code, which enables developers to spot bugs fast and early. The author of the framework himself, Sebastian Ramirez, often modestly emphasizes that FastAPI is just a mix of Starlette and Pydantic, while heavily relying on modern Python features, especially type hinting. Before diving into an example and building a FastAPI app, I believe that it is useful to quickly just go over the concepts that FastAPI is based on so that you know what to expect.

Starlette

Starlette (www.starlette.io) is an ASGI framework that routinely places at the top in various web framework speed contests and provides numerous features that are available in FastAPI as well – WebSocket support, events on startup and shutdown, session and cookie support, background tasks...