RestAPI VS FastAPI

Hello Learners,
I hope you all are doing great. A while back I was looking to enhance my skills and wanted to know more about Django and Flask, so in this learning journey, a term came up i.e.; API which is Application Programming Interface.

Simply, It is a set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. APIs allow one application to access the functionality of another application. For example, a mobile app might use an API to interact with a server in order to retrieve data or perform an action. Or a website might use an API to interact with a payment gateway to process transactions. APIs can be based on different protocols and standards, but the most common type is a web-based API that uses the HTTP protocol (the same protocol used by the World Wide Web) to transfer data.

As we know Django and Flask are web development libraries in python, hence there is more use of API comes which is RestAPI and FastAPI.

RestAPI VS FastAPI

REST API (Representational State Transfer API) and FastAPI are both web frameworks for building APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in Python, but they have some key differences:

1. Speed: FastAPI is designed to be fast, and it’s built on top of the asynchronous features of Python. This makes it well-suited for building high-performance APIs. On the other hand, REST API is based on the synchronous request-response model, which is less performant compared to FastAPI.

2. Syntax: FastAPI uses modern Python features such as type hints and async/await, which make the code more readable and maintainable. REST API does not have any specific syntax, it’s more of an architectural style.

3. Built-in features: FastAPI comes with a lot of built-in features like automatic docs, validation, and serialization, which can help speed up development. REST API does not have built-in features like these.

4. Popularity: Django Rest Framework (DRF) is very popular and widely used to build REST APIs’ in python, whereas FastAPI is relatively new, but gaining popularity because of its performance and modern syntax.

5. Scalability: FastAPI is built on top of Starlette, which is a lightweight web framework that can handle a large number of concurrent connections, which makes it more scalable than REST API.

Now after finding the difference, So the big question arises that :

What type of Project or in which domain we should use these APIs?

RestAPI

REST API (Representational State Transfer API) is a popular architectural style for building web services, and it’s well-suited for a wide variety of projects. Here are a few examples of types of projects that are good to use REST API:

1. Traditional web applications: REST API can be used to create web applications that use a server-side language to handle logic and a client-side language to handle the presentation.

2. Mobile applications: REST API can be used to build the backend for mobile applications, allowing the mobile app to access and manipulate data on the server.

3. Microservices: REST API can be used to build a set of small, focused services that work together to perform a specific task. This is a popular approach for building large, complex systems.

4. IoT (Internet of Things) devices: REST API can be used to create an API for IoT devices, allowing them to send and receive data over the internet.

5. Integrations: REST API can be used to integrate two or more systems together. For example, a company might use a REST API to connect its CRM system with its e-commerce platform.

6. Data Access: REST API can be used to provide a simple way to access and manipulate data from a database.

7. Third-Party Services: REST API can be used to interact with third-party services such as social media platforms, payment gateways, and more.

FastAPI

FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance) web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python-type hints. Here are a few examples of types of projects that are good to use FastAPI:

1. High-performance APIs: FastAPI is designed to be fast, and it’s built on top of the asynchronous features of Python. This makes it well-suited for building high-performance APIs that need to handle a large number of requests per second.

2. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: FastAPI is a great choice for building APIs that serve machine learning or artificial intelligence models. Its fast performance and built-in support for data validation and serialization make it well-suited for this task.

3. Real-time Applications: FastAPI is great for building real-time applications such as chat or gaming applications.

4. Microservices: FastAPI is well-suited for building small, focused microservices that work together to perform a specific task. Its lightweight and fast performance make it a great choice for this kind of architecture.

5. Web scraping and Data scraping: FastAPI can be used to build an API that allows you to scrape data from websites or other sources in a fast and efficient manner.

6. WebSockets: FastAPI has built-in support for WebSockets, which makes it easy to implement real-time functionality in your APIs.

7. Asynchronous: FastAPI is built on top of asyncio and supports asynchronous programming, which can be useful for IO-bound and high-performance requirements.

So all done, here is a small intro or idea to start with APIs in Python.

Keep Learning…. Thanks for Reading …..

Follow me on LinkedIn for more learning and sharing.