FastAPI

Preface

This is a pragmatic introduction to FastAPI—a modern Python web framework. It’s also a story of how, now and then, the bright and shiny objects that we stumble across can turn out to be very useful. A silver bullet is nice to have when you encounter a werewolf. (And you will encounter werewolves later in this book.)

I started programming scientific applications in the mid-1970s. And after I first met Unix and C on a PDP-11 in 1977, I had a feeling that this Unix thing might catch on.

In the ’80s and early ’90s, the internet was still noncommercial, but already a good source for free software and technical info. And when a web browser called Mosaic was distributed on the baby open internet in 1993, I had a feeling that this web thing might catch on.

When I started my own web development company a few years later, my tools were the usual suspects at the time: PHP, HTML, and Perl. On a contract job a few years later, I finally experimented with Python and was surprised at how quickly I was able to access, manipulate, and display data. In my spare time over two weeks, I was able to replicate most of a C application that had taken four developers a year to write. Now I had a feeling that this Python thing might catch on.

After that, most of my work involved Python and its web frameworks, mostly Flask and Django. I particularly liked the simplicity of Flask and preferred it for many jobs. But just a few years ago, I spied something glinting in the underbrush: a new Python web ...