Summary
In this chapter, we have explored the world of APIs. We started with a brief overview of the Web and moved on to a relatively recent Python topic: type hinting. The latter is interesting enough on its own, but in this case, it is a foundational characteristic of the FastAPI framework, so it was important to make sure we covered it in this chapter.
We then discussed APIs in generic terms. We saw different ways to classify them, and the purposes and benefits of their use. We also explored protocols and data-exchange formats.
Finally, we delved into the source code, analyzing a small part of the FastAPI project which was written for this chapter, and exploring different ways in which the resulting API can be consumed.
We concluded the chapter with a series of suggestions for the next steps, which we think are quite important, given the ubiquitous nature of this topic nowadays.
The next chapter discusses packaging Python applications.
