REST, RESTful and restlite

This post announces a new open source software: http://code.google.com/p/restlite/

What is restlite? Restlite is a light-weight Python implementation of server tools for quick prototyping of your RESTful web service. Instead of building a complex framework, it aims at providing functions and classes that allows your to build your own application.

restlite = REST + Python + JSON + XML + SQLite + authentication

Features
  1. Very lightweight module with single file in pure Python and no other dependencies hence ideal for quick prototyping.
  2. Two levels of API: one is not intrusive (for low level WSGI) and other is intrusive (for high level @resource).
  3. High level API can conveniently use sqlite3 database for resource storage.
  4. Common list and tuple-based representation that is converted to JSON and/or XML.
  5. Supports pure REST as well as allows browser and Flash Player access (with GET, POST only).
  6. Integrates unit testing using doctest module.
  7. Handles HTTP cookies and authentication.
  8. Integrates well with WSGI compliant applications.

Motivation: As you may have noticed, the software provides tools such as (1) regular expression based request matching and dispatching WSGI compliant router, (2) high-level resource representation using a decorator and variable binding, (3) functions for converting from unified list representation to JSON and XML, and (3) data model and authentication classes. These tools can be used independent of each other. For example, you just need the router function to implement RESTful web services. If you also want to do high-level definitions of your resources you can use the @resource decorator, or bind functions to convert your function or object to WSGI compliant application that can be given to the router. You can return any representation from your application. However, if you want to support multiple consistent representations of XML and JSON, you can use the represent function of request.response method to do so. Finally, you can have any data model you like, but implementations of common SQL style data model and HTTP basic and cookie based authentication are provided for you to use if needed.

This software is provided with a hope to help you quickly realize RESTful services in your application without having to deal with the burden of large and complex frameworks. Any feedback is appreciated. If you have trouble using the software or want to learn more on how to use, feel free to send me a note!

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