A simple RESTful API Proxy written in Python/Flask that combines and caches multiple calls to an API into one single call with a lightweight response. These kind of API Proxies are useful when creating a mobile application (in order to send as little data as possible over the wire) or when combining multiple different APIs into one.

• Table of contents
  • Prerequisites
  • Setup
  • Dependencies
  • Available APIs
    • 1. Events with subscriptions
  • Executing Tests

1. Python 3.2 or later.
2. virtualenv is recommended.

1. Clone the repository using
   git clone https://github.com/ninadpdr/simple-api-proxy-cached.git.
2. This will create a new directory simple-api-proxy-cached.
   From inside the directory, create a virtualenv using virtualenv .venv.
3. Once the virtualenv is created, activate it using source .venv/bin/activate.
4. Now, install all the packages from the requirements.txt file,
   using the command, pip install -r requirements.txt.
5. Then run the app using python app.py.
   This will start the API proxy server on http://0.0.0.0:5000/.

This app uses following Python libraries:

1. Flask

   This service is a perfect candidate for using a microframework. It's a simple RESTful web service, doesn't need ORM, templating, etc. Which is why Flask is chosen.

2. Flask-RESTful

   Flask-RESTful is an extension for Flask that adds support for quickly building REST APIs. Flask-RESTful encourages best practices with minimal setup. For example, we use using multiple return values in Flask-RESTful to return the response with an HTTP response status code.

3. blinker

   This is a requirement for connecting a custom error handler to Flask-RESTful.

4. requests

   We use requests library to call the APIs we are proxying to.

5. unittest

   Test module in the Python standard library.

Given an event ID, returns the event title and the first names of its attendees.

• URL
  /events-with-subscriptions/:event_id/

• Method
  GET

• URL Params
  Required:
  event_id=[string]

• Data Params
  None

• Success Response

  • Code: 200 OK
  • Content:

    {
        "id": "<event-id>",
        "title": "<event-title>",
        "names": "<list-of-first-names>"
    }

• Error Response

  • Code: 400 Bad Request, 502 Bad Gateway, 504 Gateway Timeout
  • Content:

    {
        "error": {
            "message": "<error-description>", 
            "status_code": <HTTP-status-code>
        }
    }

• Sample Call

  $ http GET http://0.0.0.0:5000/events-with-subscriptions/0069c02d7fa333a88b7e50d850b9bcf6_14677217380318/
  HTTP/1.0 200 OK
  Cache-Control: max-age=252
  Content-Length: 273
  Content-Type: application/json
  Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2016 18:43:05 GMT
  Server: Werkzeug/0.11.10 Python/3.5.1
  
  {
      "id": "0069c02d7fa333a88b7e50d850b9bcf6_14677217380318", 
      "names": [
          "API", 
          "Michel", 
          "Jasper", 
          "Bob", 
          "Dennis", 
          "Edmon", 
          "Aslesha", 
          "Lars"
      ], 
      "title": "Drink a cup of coffee with C42 Team"
  }
  
  $ http GET http://0.0.0.0:5000/events-with-subscriptions/0069c02d7fa333a88b7e50d850b9bcf6_1467721738031/
  HTTP/1.0 404 NOT FOUND
  Content-Length: 166
  Content-Type: application/json
  Date: Fri, 08 Jul 2016 18:43:11 GMT
  Server: Werkzeug/0.11.10 Python/3.5.1
  
  {
      "error": {
          "code": "NOT_FOUND", 
          "message": "Event 0069c02d7fa333a88b7e50d850b9bcf6_1467721738031 not found", 
          "status_code": 404
      }
  }
  

Tests are located under tests directory. To execute all tests,

1. cd to project directory.
2. source .venv/bin/activate.
3. python -m unittest discover -s tests.