In this chapter, we designed a RESTful API to interact with a simple dictionary that acted as a data repository and perform CRUD operations with messages. We defined the requirements for our API and we understood the tasks performed by each HTTP method. We set up a virtual environment with Flask and Flask-RESTful.

We created a model to represent and persist messages. We learned to configure serialization of messages into JSON representations with the features included in Flask-RESTful. We wrote classes that represent resources and process the different HTTP requests and we configured the URL patterns to route URLs to classes.

Finally, we started Flask development server and we used command-line tools to compose and send HTTP requests to our RESTful API and analyzed how each HTTP request was processed in our code. We also worked with GUI tools to compose and send HTTP requests.

Now that we understand the basics of the combination of Flask and Flask-RESTful to create RESTful APIs, we will expand the capabilities of the RESTful Web API by taking advantage of advanced features included in Flask-RESTful and related ORMs, which is what we are going to discuss in the next chapter.