As a developer, I want to use a REST API framework so that I don't re-invent the wheel

[abompard]

We want to write a REST API in Python following the OpenAPI standard. There are many web frameworks and libraries that can help us with that.

Here's what I think we should consider:

• Flask-RestPlus
• Connexion
• FastAPI -- not based on Flask but very promising

Acceptance Criteria

The project must:

• be maintained, with regular releases, a responding bug tracker and a strong developer community
• have a strong user community and be widely used
• be compatible with OpenAPI
• be reasonably fast

I haven't personally tried any of those frameworks but they look interesting. I think FastAPI is very much worth investigating, as it is based on solid libraries, has good references, and supports async. They have an interesting page listing other API projects that they took inspiration from.

[abompard]

I did have a look at them and while FastAPI's defaut support for async is attractive, our team's willingness to standardize on Flask is also very important to consider.

Looking at Connexion's supported authentication schemes, I'm not sure it would work well with our GSSAPI authentication, and the docs aren't clear on how to extend authentication schemes (but that can be researched).
So if there aren't any better candidate, I suggest we evaluate Flask-Restplus and see if it's worthwhile to use it in place of pure Flask. Also note that Flask-Restplus has been forked due to inactivity. Maybe the new fork is a better way to go.