When we write Python programs, we often need to print out the results and also log some exceptions. As a beginner, we would normally use the print function to log everything. It is handy to use the print command but the logs are not stored properly and are difficult to check sometime after the program is finished. As a best practice for logging in python, we should use the built-in logging module. With the logging module, we can log different levels of messages to different destinations. We can also configure the log messages to be sent to some channels so…

Falcon is a WSGI library for building web APIs using the REST architectural style. Before we get started, let’s get familiar with two important terminologies, which can be mentioned in interviews and the Falcon documentations.

• WSGI — Web Server Gateway Interface. It is an interface specification by which web server and application communicate. A WSGI application is just a callable with a well-defined signature so that you can host the application with any web server that understands the WSGI protocol.
• REST — REpresentational State Transfer. It is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development…

A cool new feature called assignment expression was introduced in PEP572 since Python 3.8. Assignment expression uses operator := to assign the value of an expression to a variable. Since operator := resembles the eyes and tusks of a walrus, it is informally known as “the walrus operator”.

The assignment expressions are most commonly used in if and while conditions to simplify code. While they can also be used in other cases as demonstrated in PEP572, it is recommended not to do so in order to improve code readability and avoid confusion.

The major benefit of assignment expressions is that…

Postman is a collaboration platform for API development. If you are a software developer and need to develop, test, and maintain an API or a set of API endpoints, you will find Postman very helpful. In this article, we won’t introduce too many concepts about API and Postman but will focus on some of the most common use cases which shall be handy for your development work.

You can use the web version of Postman directly, or you can download and install it on your computer. …

A decorator is a function that takes another function as input, extends its behavior, and returns a new function as output. This is possible because, in Python, functions are first-class objects, which means they can be passed as arguments to functions and also be returned from functions, just as other types of objects such as string, int, or float.

Let’s first demonstrate how a decorator works. Once you understand it, you won’t use it as a black box anymore.

Let’s create a super simple function:

def func1():
    print("Inside func1.")>>> func1()
Inside func1.

Then let’s create a simple decorator, which…

Python is a dynamically typed programming language, which means the types are only checked at runtime and a variable is allowed to change its type over its lifetime, whereas a statically typed language like Java checks the types at compile-time, and a variable is not allowed to change its type over its lifetime. On the other hand, Python is a strongly typed language because the types cannot be automatically converted at runtime. For example, you cannot have an addition calculation on integer 1 and string "2", while in a weakly typed language such as JavaScript such calculation is allowed.

Even…

Google is a great source for obtaining data, either in your personal projects or in real business projects. Google has a Custom Search Engine (CSE) API which can be conveniently used in your Python code. It has a free version which is enough for studying purpose or even small projects which have less than 100 search queries every day.

To get started using Google Custom Search Engine, you need to have a valid API key, which can be obtained here. You need to log in with your Google account and create a project for it. You can create a project…

In this article, some advanced CRUD and search queries for nested objects in Elasticsearch will be introduced. If you want to learn more about the basics about Elasticsearch you can check these articles for a quick start or refresh:

• What is Elasticsearch and why is it so fast?
• All you need to know about using Elasticsearch in Python.
• Learn Elasticsearch from practical examples.

In case you just want to learn nested objects in Elasticsearch. You can run this command in Kibana to create the index which will be used later.

In this example, the attributes field is a nested…