15
A Functional Approach to Web Services
We’ll step away from the topic of exploratory data analysis to look at web servers and web services. A web server is, to an extent, a cascade of functions. We can apply a number of functional design patterns to the problem of presenting web content. Our goal is to look at ways in which we can approach Representational State Transfer (REST). We want to build RESTful web services using functional design patterns.
We don’t need to invent yet another Python web framework. Nor do we want to select from among the available frameworks. There are many web frameworks available in Python, each with a distinct set of features and advantages.
The intent of this chapter is to present some principles that can be applied to most of the available frameworks. This will let us leverage functional design patterns for presenting web content.
When we look at extremely large or complex datasets, we might want a web service that supports subsetting...
