My first framework, please judge me

Posted by Ok-Intern-8921@reddit | Python | View on Reddit | 33 comments

Hi all! First post here!

I'm excited to introduce LightAPI, a lightweight framework designed for quickly building API endpoints using Python's native libraries. It streamlines the process of creating APIs by reducing boilerplate code while still providing flexibility through SQLAlchemy for ORM and aiohttp for handling async HTTP requests.

I've been working in software development for quite some time, but I haven't contributed much to open source projects until now. LightAPI is my first step in that direction, and I’d love your help and feedback!

What My Project Does:
LightAPI simplifies API development by auto-generating RESTful endpoints for SQLAlchemy models. It's built around simplicity and performance, ensuring minimal setup while supporting asynchronous operations through aiohttp. This makes it highly efficient for handling concurrent requests and building fast, scalable applications.

Target Audience:
This framework is ideal for developers who need a quick, lightweight solution for building APIs, especially for prototyping, small-to-medium projects, or situations where development speed is critical. While it’s fully functional, it’s not yet intended for production-level applications—though with the right contributions, it can definitely get there!

Comparison:
Unlike heavier frameworks like Django REST Framework, which provides many advanced features but requires more setup, LightAPI focuses on minimalism and speed. It automates a lot of the boilerplate code for CRUD operations but doesn’t compromise on flexibility. When compared to FastAPI, LightAPI is more stripped down—it doesn't include dependency injection or models out-of-the-box. However, its async-first approach via aiohttp gives it strong performance advantages for smaller, focused use cases where simplicity is key.

My Future Plans:
I'm still figuring out how to handle database migrations automatically, similar to how Django does it. For now, Alembic is a great tool to manage schema versioning, but I'm thinking ahead about adding more modularity and customization, similar to how Tornado allows for modular async operations and custom middleware/token handling.

You can find more details about the features and setup in the README file, including sample code that shows how easy it is to get started.

I'd love for you to help improve LightAPI by:

Reviewing the codebase
Suggesting features
Submitting pull requests
Offering advice on how I can improve my coding style, practices, or architecture.

Any suggestions or contributions would be hugely appreciated. I'm open to feedback on all aspects—from performance optimizations to code readability, as I aim to make LightAPI a powerful yet simple tool for developers.

Here’s the repo: https://github.com/iklobato/LightAPI

Thanks for your time! Looking forward to collaborating with you all and growing this project together!

Cheers!

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Foreign_Eye3252@reddit

Congrats on your first open-source contribution! LightAPI sounds like a powerful framework for simplifying API development in Python. As someone who’s worked with lightweight Python frameworks, I wanted to share Flet GUI Designer—a Python tool that helps streamline the process of creating cross-platform graphical user interfaces. It might be useful for those working on both APIs and GUIs with minimal setup. You can check it out here: Flet GUI Designer. Looking forward to seeing how LightAPI evolves!

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terremoth@reddit

Honestly? We dont need a new framework. If your intentions is to use this in production, you have a long road:

Dont be the only one doing the project, or it will be dead soon
100% cover on unit tests. I saw you did tests but only as testing the application. Showing ≈100% is a minimum guarantee to others your software works
Follow all PIPs and code conventions. Use Pycharm to detect everything that can be enhanced. Errors, warnings, typos... everything
Create a docker image so people can test and try without downloading everything
Create a documentation page showing everything with examples
Create tests to test securities bugs, use some automated pentest suite
Show benchmark/stress tests, use some tool like ab (apache benchmark tool) or Locust. This will help you show how your product is better than others.
On python 13, the GIL can be disabled boosting multi thread support. Maybe this can be interesting for you
Put your project on pypi so people can download it via pip install

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rezo_por_vos@reddit

100% of cocerage is not equal that your project is 100% secure

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terremoth@reddit

Yes, thats why in the 6th item I told that there needs a security automated suite to execute security tests, but I guess you didn't read, right?

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rezo_por_vos@reddit

I'm talking about the fact that 100% test coverage doesn't mean the system is 100% robust, reliable, and completely free of functional errors, not about security vulnerabilities.

Although 100% coverage ensures that every line of code has been executed at least once during testing, it doesn't guarantee that the system is completely resistant to all possible functional errors in a real production environment.

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terremoth@reddit

It guarantees your software works as expected.
Pentest tools to ensure security
Benchmark/stress test to ensure how many requests/responses it can deliver
static analyzers like pycharm has ensures your software has good code quality

These 4 makes a pillar that your software have no problems. It can of course have logical or performance problems that some algorithms can solve, but not a problem that will break in production.

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emile3141516@reddit

Is funny ur comment because if u remove the ugly part, the rest is pretty constructive, but... u know, all programmers can't remove ugly part because they are the ugly part lol.

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terremoth@reddit

But we indeed don't need more frameworks. We have a lot in many languages that do theses things insanely well, fast, well documented, many contributors etc. It is like always trying to reinvent the wheel. Actually this isn't the problem at all, the problem is "think is good enough to put in production and work professionally with it".

I will always discourage this. It is far better to contribute to things that already exists and enhance them more.

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Ok-Intern-8921@reddit (OP)

Hi u/terremoth , I agree with most of your points — ultimately, we write code for future developers. However, we also code to solve real business problems and deliver features that drive the company forward. This tool was born out of a personal need; no other framework provides the ability to automatically generate all REST endpoints from a single model, we have to code it manually. That’s the key: achieving the same results as other tools, but in less time and with less effort.

And as I commented, there is no intention of using this on prod, sometimes we just want to validate some things on create fast prototypes, so in a near future we can make it even a cloud function from it.

And the plan is also have a group of people to help and maintain the tool based on the usage, Im not planing to do this by myself

Thanks for the comment!

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adrian_v7@reddit

Some resources might be useful for you: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/ for making your project available as a package. Here make sure you go with a ‘pyproject.toml’ instead of setup.py https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/ for lint and produce better code quality. Might be interesting to go with mypy static typed checker or https://github.com/beartype/beartype for dynamic type checking https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs for documentation site generated. There is possible to deliver via GitHub pages. https://github.com/AdrianCert/snap4frame to catch the exception on production to make for you easy time to understand the user exception or provide to user a detailed stack-trace.

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Ok-Intern-8921@reddit (OP)

Awesome references, Im taking a look into every each of them.

And for the documentation, Im merging this PR here https://github.com/iklobato/LightAPI/pull/3 so we have the possibility to write the examples and use cases somewhere

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Ok-Intern-8921@reddit (OP)

The intention is not to use in prod, but have a quick development choice while working on some prototype or idea validation, thats why Im trying to make the most automate things based on the daily software development work, like creating crud endpoints, and database connections.

Im considering ALL points you wrote here, I really appreciate! Thanks!

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SweetOnionTea@reddit

I would want to see more error handling. For instance in the handler classes:

def add_and_commit_item(self, db: Session, item):
    """
    Adds and commits a new item to the database.

    Args:
        db (Session): The SQLAlchemy session for database operations.
        item (Base): The item to add and commit.

    Returns:
        Base: The item after committing to the database.
    """
    db.add(item)
    db.commit()
    db.refresh(item)
    return item

which assumes all transactions will succeed is called by

async def handle(self, db, request):
    """
    Processes the POST request to create and save a new item.

    Args:
        db (Session): The SQLAlchemy session for database operations.
        request (web.Request): The aiohttp web request object.

    Returns:
        web.Response: The JSON response containing the created item.
    """
    data = await self.get_request_json(request)
    item = self.model(**data)
    item = self.add_and_commit_item(db, item)
    return self.json_response(item, status=201)

I suppose it probably crashes on the exception, but now the client is kinda left hanging I think. Maybe do a try/catch on the db transactions and send back the appropriate error response.

Also try/catch around Session() creation. I can imagine a scenario where you reach the max number of db connections and it crashes under heavy load.

For enhancements I would suggest

A request queue for heavy loads.
Handle multiple objects in a single add/mod/delete/etc...
Opt in/out to methods. Maybe you don't want to make every object have every method?
Possibly use a scoped_session for your connections? Seems like that's what you're aiming for.

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Ok-Intern-8921@reddit (OP)

Hello! You’ve raised some excellent points. Here are my thoughts:

The concept of a queue should be flexible and allow for user customization, such as adding caching options. We could implement a Redis or Memcached solution so users could simply import it like from lightapi.database import cache and use cached results with cache.get(key). So once the user configured the cache, we can use it directly from the lib
The idea of not having a exception raising on that was exactly to not run based on the library implementation, but how the user is dealing with it, I dont know if this is the right approach, can you give me more ideas about that?
When it comes to handling multiple objects, I think this should be managed at the web server level by configuring the web workers to handle requests and responses efficiently. It’s not ideal to overload the code with these responsibilities; some tasks should remain on the infrastructure side, even in a prototype.
I wasn’t aware of SQLAlchemy’s scoped session—this definitely seems like the next step. Thanks for pointing that out!

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SweetOnionTea@reddit

I suppose if it's just intended for quick prototyping you can probably ignore all of my comments.

The idea of not having a exception raising on that was exactly to not run based on the library implementation, but how the user is dealing with it, I dont know if this is the right approach, can you give me more ideas about that?

Welp, I'm thinking you can catch the exceptions from the db transaction and present a 500 error. Here's an example from the documentation.

When it comes to handling multiple objects, I think this should be managed at the web server level by configuring the web workers to handle requests and responses efficiently. It’s not ideal to overload the code with these responsibilities; some tasks should remain on the infrastructure side, even in a prototype.

Having the ability to perform an operation with multiple objects in one call would give users the ability to be efficient with their calls. For instance if I have 100 objects to add then I would have to make 100 calls to add them all instead of 1 call with all the 100 objects. Or the other way around. If I have 10,000 objects in my database and want to display 100 of them. I would have to either make 100 GET requests or I guess make 1 to get all 10,000 objects and filter what I need. Just a thought.

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bolinocroustibat@reddit

Functions are not type hinted?

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SweetOnionTea@reddit

Yeah, a good idea to do that too. The project is really small so probably a good 10-20 min job. And honestly a perfect task for an LLM from what I've experienced.

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rbscholtus@reddit

Chatgpt can do the bulk of that work. Just verify the difference and then commit.

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kobumaister@reddit

Don't get me wrong, it's amazing that you build that all by yourself, and I encourage you to keep working. I won't be capable of such a project.

But.

What's the point of such a big project? We have Django-rest, fastapi, starlette-api... And those are projects maintained by a big team. I don't see why nobody would choose yours over those for so many reasons I don't know where to start.

If you want to do such a big project, you have to tale it things like viability, market need, entry barrier, and try to find some contributors.

In my opinion, you didngreat on the technical side, but not so great on the "business" side.

Don't let any opinion get you down, you really achieved something here.

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Ok-Intern-8921@reddit (OP)

Hey, thanks so much for your comment—it means a lot to me!

At the moment, I don’t have a way to create an endpoint unrelated to any model, but that's definitely something I’ll be working on!
I also need to move the internal examples elsewhere. In the next version, I’m thinking about centralizing them in a specific folder.

My goal is to offer a simple solution for developers to quickly create and connect endpoints to the database without additional configuration or needing to handle return values. Having everything in one file while automatically implementing the most commonly used REST endpoints feels like a win to me. This approach is based on my own experience and needs.

As for the business side, I completely agree with you. I’m more of a technical person, and navigating the business aspect isn’t my strong suit. My main aim is to provide developers with the solution I was searching for a few months ago.

I really appreciate your feedback—thanks again!

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rbscholtus@reddit

For connecting an api to a Db really fast, I recommend looking into Fastapi with SQLModel. Literally designed to receive json data, validate and transform into your sqlmodel, and save to db right away. Use Alembic to get db migrations... it's been done.

Actually, chatgpt can write the little code you need that get an api going.

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ColdPorridge@reddit

fastapi

maintained by a big team

The fact that it’s not is one of the most common criticisms and reasons for litestar’s existence.

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kobumaister@reddit

? it has 700 contributors in github.

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Chasian@reddit

That are funneled through one guy

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kobumaister@reddit

As the linux kernel.

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WJMazepas@reddit

Nice. For small CRUDs, projects like internal enterprise systems, I can see this being used just fine.

And what about microservices that connect to an API to access the database? It seems that it could be used for that as well

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Ok-Intern-8921@reddit (OP)

Thats the idea! The main goal of this project is to offer a quick solution for product validation, prototyping, or cases where you don’t want to spend too much time on the API. Since this was born out of a personal need, I thought it would be great to provide the ability to create just one model and automatically generate all the related REST endpoints.

Thanks for your comment!

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lexplua@reddit

Maybe off topic question, but: why ?

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FlurpNurdle@reddit

Soooo... lots of "why"? questions. Sure, this may today be inferior or duplicative to existing longer term projects (i have no idea if it is or not) and a few posts have listed some things to do to show others how it compares to other more established projects as a reason to use it. But...

The only way to have a better offering is to make something and see if it offers a niche thats needed, or "do xyz better" or grow it and maybe it becomes an established project. Not everything from a single dev/small team gets announced/published as enterprise level production grade suitable for worldwide use while also destroying all competition and disrupting entire ecosystems.

Why have more than (rolls dice) ... 3? Web frameworks? Why even tryto develop a new language when C exists already? Etc.

Anyway: keep at it OP. Take all productive suggestions given for betterment for your cause/code/self and see where it goes. Even if your project doesn't "make it" (whatever that means to you) what you learn along the way in trying to create something (anything) has far more worth than any project.

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Minimum_Diver_3958@reddit

I like the short circuit approach to just shoving a model to a route and it becomes a whole set of resource endpoints. I think it has potential for quick mvp or small scale projects. If you build well thought out and capable config then even more complex usecases. You have my star.

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yxngdao@reddit

Why? Who asked for this? Who will yse this? Idk.

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ConfucianStats@reddit

Nice

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Embarrassed-Mix6420@reddit

Who needs this? Why do vendors of complexity come to pythonic world now? You don't need to study any new framework to build restful APIs with python. Just like you don't need any framework to launch a website in python. Reddit itself is a python website with the lib me the called Pyramid that is thin layer over standard python libs much smaller then Django. Unless you have something bigger then reddit and in the course of your work found your boilerplate really needed and avoidable I'd focus on making things simpler not more complex.