Falcon is a high-performance bare-metal open source minimalist Python framework for building cloud APIs, smart proxies, and app backends. Falcon complements more general Python web frameworks.
The Falcon web framework encourages the REST architectural style, meaning (among other things) that you think in terms of resources and state transitions, which map to HTTP verbs. Only the essentials are included, with six and mimeparse the only dependencies beyond the standard library.
Falcon is designed for applications that need a high level of customization or performance tuning. It makes it easier to find errors, which is particularly important in large-scale production deployments.
Falcon is an Apache-licensed Rackspace community project.
Key Features
- Highly-optimized, extensible code base and a clean design.
- Intuitive routing via URI templates and resource classes.
- Easy access to headers and bodies through request and response classes.
- Routes based on URI templates RFC.
- REST-inspired mapping of URIs to resources. Resources are Python classes, which include a few methods and a specific naming convention.
- DRY request processing via middleware components and hooks
- Does not use WebOb (some of us consider this a feature).
- Idiomatic HTTP error responses via a handy exception base class.
- DRY request processing using global, resource, and method hooks.
- Global, resource, and method hooks.
- Minimal attack surface for writing secure APIs.
- Works with any WSGI server such as Gunicorn and uWSGI. WSGI is a specification used for interfacing Web servers and Web applications or frameworks for the Python language. WSGI was built to promote portable Web application development.
- Snappy unit testing through WSGI helpers and mocks.
- CPython 2.6/2.7, PyPy, Jython 2.7, and CPython 3.3/3.4 support. No tight coupling with any async framework.
- Error handling.
- 20% speed boost when Cython is available.
- Full Unicode support.
Website: falconframework.org
Support: Community, Wiki, Talks and Podcasts, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Rackspace Hosting, Inc. and other contributors
License: Apache License, Version 2.0
Falcon is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Best Python Micro Frameworks | |
|---|---|
| Flask | Hugely popular microframework based on Werkzeug and Jinja2 |
| FastAPI | Web framework for building APIs |
| Starlette | Lightweight ASGI framework/toolkit |
| aiohttp | Asynchronous HTTP client/server for asyncio and Python |
| Sanic | Web server and web framework |
| Falcon | Build cloud APIs, smart proxies, and app backends |
| Quart | Web microframework based on Asyncio |
| Pyramid | Start small, finish big, stay finished framework |
| Bottle | Fast, simple and lightweight WSGI micro web framework |
| Chalice | Python Serverless Microframework for AWS |
| CherryPy | Mature, minimalist, Python object-oriented web framework |
| TurboGears | Hybrid framework acting as a Full Stack framework or Microframework |
| Quixote | Aimed at sites where complex programming is required |
| Klein | Micro-framework for developing production-ready web services with Python |
| circuits | Lightweight event driven application framework |
| Clastic | Functional web framework |
| Hug | Make developing Python driven APIs as simple as possible |
| MicroPie | Ultra-micro ASGI Python web framework |
| Litestar | Powerful, lightweight, and flexible ASGI framework |
| BlackSheep | Asynchronous Python web framework |
| Robyn | Python web framework designed for high performance |
| Microdot | Small web framework for Python and MicroPython |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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