Ask HN: Fastest setup for Restful Web Service

7 points by sph130 12 years ago | 13 comments

Because I don't trust the results of google and how old they are I am going to ask the HN Community. I want to get a proof of concept out for an app. I am more of a UI developer and have dabbled in django/tastypie however it will take me a good couple days to get that setup in AWS. I have a data model that I could easily implement in a database (pretty good with SQL) but not tied to relational DB. My Question: What is the absolute easiest and fastest way to setup a restful web service based on a datamodel. (And I'd like to use json for the format) GO!

mmariani 12 years ago |

Go with Flask Restless [1]. You're gonna be up and running in minutes.

[1] https://flask-restless.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quickstart....

bjourne 12 years ago | |

Seconded! It's an awesome module. But you need to know at least a little something about SQLAlchemy and Flask to get started. Here is an example on how to set it up and use OAuth for login: https://github.com/bjourne/vvm/blob/master/app/restapi.py

sph130 12 years ago | | |

Thanks!

chatmasta 12 years ago | |

Side note: If any of you are familiar with flask restless, and taking on freelancing work, I have a project for you. It's the backend to a company that will be applying to YC this summer. Email miles@5280holdings.com

sph130 12 years ago | |

thanks mmariani : This looks very close to the model/py in django.

schneidmaster 12 years ago |

If you don't mind server-side JavaScript, I've fallen head over heels for SailsJS[0]. It's a Node framework built on top of Express that has MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite integration. The hook is that it automatically generates a REST API for all of your models. So you "sails new project", "cd project", "sails generate model thing", edit models/thing and add the attributes, and you're done. Backbone routes are created automagically. (You can also define more complex API functionality in the controller as usual, and it also has built-in socket.io support.)

[0] http://sailsjs.org

Ryel 12 years ago |

If you feel like you have a headstart in Django, I'd go that route.

Else, I might be partial to do it in something like Rails that would allow me to write almost 0 lines of code, instead just spend time connecting various gems, libraries, etc and make a push to Heroku and get a proof of concept up.

While Proof-Of-Concept is running (free on Heroku) I would probably spend time rewriting it in Python or if you become partial to Ruby, just sticking with it...

sph130 12 years ago | |

Django was basically that at the end - but its the fact that i've done it once and so until I get back into it the ramp up time is the same. I've dabbled in ruby before too. Have you had any luck with specific tutorials to get going?

Ryel 12 years ago | | |

Sorry for replying so late.

One of the favorites for Rails would be Michael Hartl's guide to rails. It's easy to follow, free, and quite extensive.

When you start actually building something, theres a collection of videos called 'railscasts' and theres a video for just about any topic in rails you can imagine.

ckotso 12 years ago |

...or you might want to forgo the custom back-end completely and use one of the "nobackend" solutions: http://nobackend.org/solutions.html

For example deployd is open source AFAIR; others (like Firebase, Parse) are hosted solutions. But overall they all give you instant CRUD over your data. In your case, their turn-key multi-user capabilities are a bonus.

sph130 12 years ago | |

I've looked at kinvey before. Maybe worth looking back into this. Have you had any experience with their ability to scale? (I know - get users first and then scale :| but you know.. can't help but thinking it)

ckotso 12 years ago | | |

Not really, I've only tried small things. But I _guess_ if you look around their documentation they should discuss SLAs and their KPIs.

sph130 12 years ago |

Yikes.. almost lost my post and couldn't find it again. (Is there a my posts section or should i just bookmark it?)