connexion VS flask-restful

Compare connexion vs flask-restful and see what are their differences.

connexion

Connexion is a modern Python web framework that makes spec-first and api-first development easy. (by spec-first)

flask-restful

Simple framework for creating REST APIs (by flask-restful)
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connexion flask-restful
23 5
4,407 6,763
0.6% 0.4%
8.4 1.5
7 days ago 7 days ago
Python Python
Apache License 2.0 BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

connexion

Posts with mentions or reviews of connexion. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-27.
  • Write OpenAPI with TypeSpec
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2024
    I like the idea, especially the TS-like syntax around enums and union types. I've always preferred the SDL for GraphQL vs writing OpenAPI for similar reasons.

    I echo the sentiment others have brought up, which is the trade-offs of a code-driven schema vs schema-driven code.

    At work we use Pydantic and FastAPI to generate the OpenAPI contract, but there's some cruft and care needed around exposing those underlying Pydantic models through the API documentation. It's been easy to create schemas that have compatibility problems when run through other code generators. I know there are projects such as connexction[1] which attempt to inverse this, but I don't have much experience with it. In the GraphQL space it seems that code-first approaches are becoming more favored, though there's a different level of complexity needed to create a "typesafe" GraphQL server (eg. model mismatches between root query resolvers and field resolvers).

    [1] https://github.com/spec-first/connexion

  • Show HN: REST Alternative to GraphQL and tRPC
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Oct 2023
    > While REST APIs don't generally provide the same level of control to clients as GraphQL, many times this could be seen as a benefit especially in scenarios where strict control over data access and operations is crucial.

    Rest is more secure, cacheable, and more performant on the server side as field resolution doesn't need to happen like it does with GraphQL. It is not more performant on the client side, and this is a trade-off, but I favor rest applications over GraphQL ones as a DevOps engineer. They are much easier to administer infrastructure-wise, I can cache the requests, etc.

    Data at our company suggests that several small queries actually do better performance-wise than one large one. We switched to GraphQL a year and a half ago or so, but this piece of data seems to suggest that we might have been better off just sticking with REST. My suggestion to that effect was not met with optimism either on the client or server side. Apparently there are server-side benefits as well, allowing for more modular development or something like that.

    I have used OpenAPI using connexion[1]. It was hard to understand at first, but I really liked that the single source of truth was one schema. It also made it really easy to develop against the API because it came with a UI that showed the documentation for all the rest end points and even had test buttons.

    1: https://connexion.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

  • Ask HN: Why is there no specification for Command Line Interfaces?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2023
    What's the use case? I was thinking about this exact issue because my product ships several CLI tools, but I wasn't convinced it would be worth the effort.

    An OpenAPI specification describes an HTTP interface, and I see it as useful because it makes it easier to write code in language-of-choice to generate HTTP requests (by generating client libraries from the OpenAPI spec).

    For a CLI, the interface is the command-line. Usually people type these commands, or they end up in bash scripts, or sometimes they get called from programming language of choice by shelling out to the CLI. So I could see a use case for a CLI spec, which would make it easier to generate client libraries (which would shell out to the CLI)... but it seems a little niche.

    Or maybe, as input to a documentation tool (like Swagger docs). I would imagine if you're using a CLI library like Python's Click, most of that data is already there. Click Parameters documentation: https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/8.1.x/parameters/

    Or maybe, you could start from the spec and then generate code which enforces it. So any changes pass through the spec, which would make it easy to write code (server and client-side) / documentation / changelogs. Some projects like this: Guardrail (Scala) https://github.com/guardrail-dev/guardrail , and Connexion (Python) https://github.com/spec-first/connexion .

    But without this ecosystem of tooling, documenting your CLI in a specification didn't really seem worth the effort. Of course, that's a bootstrapping problem.

  • Flask is Great!
    3 projects | /r/flask | 4 Feb 2023
    Connexion is a framework on top of Flask that automagically handles HTTP requests defined using OpenAPI/Swagger.
  • What is the best practice for mapping JSON requests to objects and back to JSON?
    2 projects | /r/flask | 25 Jan 2023
    I recommend you create a OpenAPI Specification and implement a python module that you expose via connexion or on the cli via click(for easy testing).
  • Flask-Powered APIs: Fast, Reliable, and Used by the World's Top Companies
    2 projects | /r/flask | 15 Dec 2022
    I'm here because Swagger-CodeGen created flask-Connexion boilerplate for python.
  • Python REST APIs With Flask, Connexion, and SQLAlchemy – Part 1 – Real Python
    3 projects | /r/Python | 15 Nov 2022
  • Does anybody know any good resources I could use to study ISP architecture?
    2 projects | /r/networking | 12 Nov 2022
    Personally we just prov them using librouteros and flask-connexion/openapi.
  • what's the correct architecture to build rest api in flask?
    4 projects | /r/flask | 21 Oct 2022
    The reason im using py sqla for mvc i look at flask-admin for api i look at connexion, here a tutorial if your interested.
  • What's best library for swagger + flask?
    6 projects | /r/Python | 25 Sep 2022

flask-restful

Posts with mentions or reviews of flask-restful. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-10-25.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing connexion and flask-restful you can also consider the following projects:

Flask RestPlus - Fully featured framework for fast, easy and documented API development with Flask

flask-restx - Fork of Flask-RESTPlus: Fully featured framework for fast, easy and documented API development with Flask

flask-restless - NO LONGER MAINTAINED - A Flask extension for creating simple ReSTful JSON APIs from SQLAlchemy models.

flasgger - Easy OpenAPI specs and Swagger UI for your Flask API

eve - REST API framework designed for human beings

flask-api - Browsable web APIs for Flask.

Dependency Injector - Dependency injection framework for Python

django-rest-framework - Web APIs for Django. 🎸

Blueprint/Boilerplate For Python Projects - Blueprint/Boilerplate For Python Projects

apispec - A pluggable API specification generator. Currently supports the OpenAPI Specification (f.k.a. the Swagger specification)..