Using the Flask framework for RESTful APIs

In the Implementing web services with WSGI recipe, we looked at building RESTful APIs and microservices using the WSGI components available in the Python standard library. This leads to a large amount of programming to handle a number of common cases.

How can we simplify all of the common web application programming and eliminate boilerplate code?

Getting ready

First, we'll need to add the Flask framework to our environment. This generally relies on using pip to install the latest release of Flask and the other related projects, itsdangerous, Jinja2, click, MarkupSafe, and Werkzeug.

The installation looks like the following:

slott$ sudo pip3.5 install flask
Password:
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