# Alternatives, Inspiration and Comparisons

What inspired **FastAPI**, how it compares to alternatives and what it learned from them.

## Intro

**FastAPI** wouldn't exist if not for the previous work of others.

There have been many tools created before that have helped inspire its creation.

* **Uvicorn**:
    * Will have the best performance, as it doesn't have much extra code apart from the server itself.

```

</div>

#### Generate Client Code

To generate the client code you can use the command line application `openapi-ts` that would now be installed.

Because it is installed in the local project, you probably wouldn't be able to call that command directly, but you would put it on your `package.json` file.

It could look like this:

```JSON  hl_lines="7"
{
  "name": "frontend-app",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",

So, the frontend (that runs in the browser) would try to reach `/openapi.json` and wouldn't be able to get the OpenAPI schema.

Because we have a proxy with a path prefix of `/api/v1` for our app, the frontend needs to fetch the OpenAPI schema at `/api/v1/openapi.json`.

```mermaid
graph LR

Another option is that you could use a **cloud service** that does more of the work including setting up HTTPS. It could have some restrictions or charge you more, etc. But in that case, you wouldn't have to set up a TLS Termination Proxy yourself.

I'll show you some concrete examples in the next chapters.

---

Then the next concepts to consider are all about the program running your actual API (e.g. Uvicorn).

I only speak a few languages (and not very well 😅). So, the reviewers are the ones that have the [**power to approve translations**](contributing.md#translations){.internal-link target=_blank} of the documentation. Without them, there wouldn't be documentation in several other languages.

{% if people %}
<div class="user-list user-list-center">
{% for user in people.top_translations_reviewers[:50] %}

If we had imported one after the other, like:

```Python
from .routers.items import router
from .routers.users import router
```

the `router` from `users` would overwrite the one from `items` and we wouldn't be able to use them at the same time.

So, to be able to use both of them in the same file, we import the submodules directly:

```Python hl_lines="5" title="app/main.py"

    sponsors = mkdocs.utils.yaml_load(sponsors_data_path.read_text(encoding="utf-8"))
    if not (match_start and match_end):
        raise RuntimeError("Couldn't auto-generate sponsors section")
    if not match_pre:
        raise RuntimeError("Couldn't find pre section (<style>) in index.md")
    frontmatter_end = match_pre.end()
    pre_end = match_start.end()
    post_start = match_end.start()

```Python
current_user.items
```

would make SQLAlchemy go to the `items` table and get the items for this user, but not before.

Without `orm_mode`, if you returned a SQLAlchemy model from your *path operation*, it wouldn't include the relationship data.

Even if you declared those relationships in your Pydantic models.

So, a `datetime` object would have to be converted to a `str` containing the data in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601" class="external-link" target="_blank">ISO format</a>.

The same way, this database wouldn't receive a Pydantic model (an object with attributes), only a `dict`.

You can use `jsonable_encoder` for that.

It receives an object, like a Pydantic model, and returns a JSON compatible version:

=== "Python 3.10+"