prestans

prestans is a WSGI complaint framework that allows you to rapidly build quality REST services by providing a:

  • mechanism to serialize and unserialize data in popular formats like JSON and XML without you writing any code
  • URL dispatcher that validates data provides in the URLs (supports regular expressions)
  • handler framework to get end points mapped to HTTP methods (also has hooks for pre and post handler execution to allow you to setup or clean up an environment e.g database connections).
  • glue to hook into the authentication system your application might be using
  • caching framework that is able to automatically serve cached content if a request matches.
  • set of data adapters that allow you to quickly turn REST objects into persistent object (e.g SQLAlchemy or DataStore) and vice-versa.
  • well written library of boilerplate code that handles the default scenarios (like handling unmapped URLs, authentication errors, etc).
  • prestans is WSGI compliant and should work under most popular Cloud hosting environments that support Python and with popular Web Servers.
 
The framework was born out of our team realising a pattern of boiler plate code and the lack of a standard of writing REST based services. We actively use prestans under Apache and Google's App Engine. Our applications generally also feature heavy use of Ajax interfaces generally built using Google's Closure library.
 
prestans is designed to work along side any other Python Web framework, although we'll be honest that we haven't tested it against all of them yet ;) Our philosophy is take as much or as little of the project that you like.