Foreword

Read this before you get started with Eve. This hopefully answers some questions about the purpose and goals of the project, and when you should or should not be using it.

Philosophy

You have data stored somewhere and you want to expose it to your users through a RESTful Web API. Eve is the tool that allows you to do so.

Eve provides a robust, feature rich, REST-centered API implementation, and you just need to configure your API settings and behavior, plug in your datasource, and you’re good to go. See Features for a list of features available to Eve-powered APIs. You might want to check the REST API for Humans slide deck too.

API settings are stored in a standard Python module (defaults to settings.py), which makes customization quite a trivial task. It is also possible to extend some key features, namely Authentication and Authorization, Data Validation and Data Access, by providing the Eve engine with custom objects.

A little context

At Gestionale Amica we had been working hard on a full featured, Python powered, RESTful Web API. We learned quite a few things on REST best patterns, and we had a chance to put Python’s renowned web capabilities to the test. Then, at EuroPython 2012, I had the opportunity to share what we learned. My talk sparked quite a bit of interest, and even after a few months had passed, the slides were still receiving a lot of hits every day. I kept receiving emails asking for source code examples and whatnot. After all, a REST API lies in the future of every web-oriented developer, and who isn’t one these days?

So, I thought, perhaps I could take the proprietary, closed code (codenamed ‘Adam’) and refactor it “just a little bit”, so that it could fit a much wider number of use cases. I could then release it as an open source project. Well it turned out to be slightly more complex than that but finally here it is, and of course it’s called Eve.

REST, Flask and MongoDB

The slides from my EuroPython talk, Developing RESTful Web APIs with Flask and MongoDB, are available online. You might want to check them out to understand why and how certain design decisions were made, especially with regards to REST implementation.

BSD License

A large number of open source projects you find today are GPL Licensed. While the GPL has its time and place, it should most certainly not be your go-to license for your next open source project.

A project that is released as GPL cannot be used in any commercial product without the product itself also being offered as open source.

The MIT, BSD, ISC, and Apache2 licenses are great alternatives to the GPL that allow your open-source software to be used freely in proprietary, closed-source software.

Eve is released under terms of the BSD License. See Licensing.