Joe Gregorio outlines how to implement the Atom Publishing Protocol, a RESTful API for publishing and editing Web resources, using Python. If you're grasping about looking for a way to provide a web services api for your application, starting with APP and folding in your own extensions or data model would be a good start. This would be a similar approach to what Google does with GData, which is just Atom, APP, and A9 stored queries.