In this chapter, we designed a RESTful API to interact with slow sensors and actuators. We defined the requirements for our API and understood the tasks performed by each HTTP method. We set up a virtual environment with Tornado.

We created the classes that represent a drone and wrote code to simulate the slow I/O operations that are called for each HTTP request method. We wrote classes that represent request handlers and process the different HTTP requests, and we configured the URL patterns to route URLs to request handlers and their methods.

Finally, we started the Tornado 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. We realized that each HTTP request takes some time to provide a response due to the simulation of slow I/O operations.

Now that we understand the basics of Tornado to create RESTful APIs, we will take advantage of the non-blocking features, combined with asynchronous operations in Tornado, in a new version of the API for which we will write units tests, which are the topic of the next chapter.