How to Develop RESTful APIs with Python and Flask

 REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, called RESTful Web Services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. RESTful Web Services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations.

Here is a simple example of a RESTful Web Service in Python using the Flask library:

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/hello')

def hello():

    return 'Hello, World!'

if __name__ == '__main__':

    app.run()

In this example, the Flask class is used to create a simple server. The @app.route decorator is used to specify the URL that will trigger the associated function. The function returns a string, which will be returned to the client in the HTTP response.

To test this service, you can run the script and send an HTTP GET request to 'http://localhost:5000/hello' using a tool such as 'curl' or a web browser. You should see the string "Hello, World!" in the response.

To use curl, open a terminal and enter the following command:

curl http://localhost:5000/hello

You should see the string "Hello, World!" in the terminal.

Alternatively, you can use a web browser to send the request. Open a web browser and enter the URL http://localhost:5000/hello in the address bar. You should see the string "Hello, World!" in the browser window.

To run the script, open a terminal, navigate to the directory where the script is saved, and enter the following command:

python script.py

This will start the server and you can then send requests to it as described above.