// the find
kennethreitz/responder
A familiar HTTP Service Framework for Python.
Responder is a Flask-style HTTP framework for Python built on top of Starlette, giving you async support and ASGI performance with a familiar decorator-based API. It's aimed at developers who find FastAPI too verbose but want more than Flask's sync-only model. Kenneth Reitz (requests, pipenv) is the author, which explains the ergonomics-first design.
The request/response model is genuinely pleasant — `resp.text`, `resp.media`, `resp.file()` reads naturally without ceremony. Built on Starlette means you get real ASGI performance and WebSocket support without any glue code. The before-request hook pattern for auth and rate limiting is cleaner than Flask's `@app.before_request` global. Mounting WSGI apps (Flask, Django) directly is useful for incremental migration.
You're using a thin wrapper around Starlette, which means when something breaks or behaves unexpectedly you'll be debugging two layers of abstraction with half the documentation. FastAPI has eaten this project's lunch on every axis that matters — dependency injection, Pydantic validation, OpenAPI generation — and has 10x the community. The test files are named `test_round3.py` through `test_round7.py`, which is a red flag about organic growth without refactoring. Background tasks are fire-and-forget with no queue, no retry, no visibility into failures.