# 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.

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#### 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"

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+"

The history of **FastAPI** is in great part the history of its predecessors.

As said in the section [Alternatives](alternatives.md){.internal-link target=_blank}:

<blockquote markdown="1">

**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.

---

But for this example, we'll use a very simple HTML document with some JavaScript, all inside a long string.

This, of course, is not optimal and you wouldn't use it for production.

In production you would have one of the options above.

But it's the simplest way to focus on the server-side of WebSockets and have a working example:

```Python hl_lines="2  6-38  41-43"