

Ask HN: Fastest setup for Restful Web Service  - sph130

Because I don&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;d like to use json for the format) GO!
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mmariani
Go with Flask Restless [1]. You're gonna be up and running in minutes.

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

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bjourne
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](https://github.com/bjourne/vvm/blob/master/app/restapi.py)

~~~
sph130
Thanks!

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schneidmaster
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](http://sailsjs.org)

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Ryel
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...

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sph130
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?

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Ryel
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.

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ckotso
...or you might want to forgo the custom back-end completely and use one of
the "nobackend" solutions:
[http://nobackend.org/solutions.html](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
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
Not really, I've only tried small things. But I _guess_ if you look around
their documentation they should discuss SLAs and their KPIs.

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sph130
Yikes.. almost lost my post and couldn't find it again. (Is there a my posts
section or should i just bookmark it?)

