I'd be interested in hearing other peoples' experiences too. I've tried both flask-restless and flask-restful previously but didn't get along with either of them.

I recently created a new API and went for a very simple flask.Methodview along with Marshmallow [0] for (de)serialization. I then wrote a simple replacement for marshmallow-alchemy since it wouldn't do object loading without a lot of flapping about.

I found Marshmallow really nice to work with (I'd been using Schematics in the past).

[0] https://github.com/marshmallow-code/marshmallow

I've taken to using an intermediate 'service' layer (in the parlance, but not structure, of overholt) to manage metadata on fields and inform serialization. It looks a bit like Marshmallow, but baked in as a Flask extension.

I've been kicking around different approaches to this for over a decade, going back to Castor (Java data binding), and with Python, SQLAlchemy, and the libraries mentioned here I'm finally feeling optimistic.

Request parsing in Flask-RESTful seems bolted on, and the fields in WTForms seem frustratingly redundant given that almost everything I do is going through the API anyway. Maybe focusing more on the Fields themselves will help tie it all together.

Flask-RESTful worked out for me, I like how easy it is to define routes. I'm eager to try Falcon next: http://falconframework.org/

I tried both flask-restless and restful as well, but like you have moved away from them to a simpler setup. Just using a simple flask app + blueprints with a few extra error handling / cors bits and a custom response class for json. I'm very happy with marshmallow too.

I haven't done too much with either, but for a minimal example, Flask-Restless is more straightforward. Power vs configurability trade-off by the looks of it. I'll certainly keep Flask-RESTful in mind if things get more difficult in the future.