Continuing with our series on backend development frameworks that would prove most useful to an aspiring beginning programmer, we now turn our attention to the FastAPI framework. The FastAPI framework is a relatively new, modern, high-performance framework for developing APIs with the Python programming language. Released in the year 2018 by the developer Sebastian Ramirez, it has become one of the most preferred frameworks in the current day, having been ranked as the third most-loved framework in the Stack Overflow 2021 Developer Survey.
Some of the benefits and merits of the FastAPI framework are as follows :-
- Typed Python – FastAPI makes use of Python 3.6 type declarations allowing it to use a Python feature that allows us to specify the type of a variable. The extensive use of this feature provides us developers with great editor support.
- Validation – Since FastAPI framework is based out of Pydantic, validation is very well-integrated into this framework. We can validate both standard Python types and custom field validations, for example, JSON object, UUID, URL, Email etc.
- Performance – FastAPI is a very fast backend framework in terms of performance. Built upon the ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) instead of WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface), it is actually one of the fastest Python web frameworks, since it also supports asynchronous code and concurrency.
- Dependency injection – FastAPI offers a simple and easy-to-use dependency injection system. Developers can simply declare relevant dependencies in the path operation functions assigned to the API endpoints.
- Documentation – In depth documentation of the FastAPI framework is a major plus point in favor of the framework allowing new developers to get up to speed quickly and efficiently to develop new applications.
Thus, the FastAPI framework is a great choice for new developers to experiment and explore backend development in, if they are proficient with the Python programming language. The framework will see heightened growth in the future years, with several large companies like Netflix and Uber already using it to develop their applications with several also emphasizing its importance to the field of data science.
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