Adding REST to Django -- Poll

Question

I've got a Django application that works nicely. I'm adding REST services. I'm looking for some additional input on my REST strategy.

Here are some examples of things I'm wringing my hands over.

• Right now, I'm using the Django-REST API with a pile of patches.
• I'm thinking of falling back to simply writing view functions in Django that return JSON results.
• I can also see filtering the REST requests in Apache and routing them to a separate, non-Django server instance.

Please nominate one approach per answer so we can vote them up or down.

Answer 1

I'm thinking of falling back to simply writing view functions in Django that return JSON results.

• Explicit
• Portable to other frameworks
• Doesn't require patching Django

Answer 2

Scrap the Django REST api and come up with your own open source project that others can contribute to. I would be willing to contribute. I have some code that is based on the forms api to do REST.

Answer 3

I'm thinking of falling back to simply writing view functions in Django that return JSON results.

I would go with that ..
Ali A summed it pretty well.

The main point for me is beign explicit. I would avoid using a function that automatically converts an object into json, what if the object has a reference to a user and somehow the password (even if it's hashed) go into the json snippit?

Answer 4

I ended up going with my own REST API framework for Django (that I'd love to get rid of if I can find a workable alternative), with a few custom views thrown in for corner cases I didn't want to deal with. It's worked out ok.

So a combination of 1 and 2; without some form of framework you'll end up writing the same boilerplate for the common cases.

I've also done a few stand-alone APIs. I like having them as stand-alone services, but the very fact that they stand alone from the rest of the code leads to them getting neglected. No technical reason; simply out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

What I'd really like to see is an approach that unifies Django forms and REST APIs, as they often share a lot of logic. Conceptually if your app exposes something in HTML it likely wants to expose it programmatically as well.

Answer 5

you could try making a generic functions that process the data (like parand mentioned) which you can call from the views that generate the web pages, as well as those that generate the json/xml/whatever

Answer 6

Please note that REST does not just mean JSON results. REST essentially means exposing a resource-oriented API over native but full-fledged HTTP. I am not an expert on REST, but here are a few of the things Rails is doing.

• URLs should be good, simple names for resources
• Use the right HTTP methods
  • HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE
  • Optionally with an override (form parameter '_method' will override HTTP request-method)
• Support content-type negotiation via Accept request-header
  • Optionally with an override (filename extension in the URL will override MIME-type in the Accept request-header)
  • Available content types should include XML, XHTML, HTML, JSON, YAML, and many others as appropriate

For example, to get the native HTTP support going, the server should respond to

GET /account/profile HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Accept: application/json

as it would respond to

GET /account/profile.json HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

And it should respond to

PUT /account/profile HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

var=value

as it would respond to

POST /account/profile HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

_method=PUT&var=value

Answer 7

For anyone else looking for a very decent, pluggable API application for Django, make sure you checkout jespern's django-piston which is used internally at BitBucket.

It's well maintained, has a great following and some cool forks which do things like add support for pagination and other authentication methods (OAuth is supported out of the box).

Answer 8

You could take look at django-dynamicresponse, which is a lightweight framework for adding REST API with JSON to your Django applications.

It requires minimal changes to add API support to existing Django apps, and makes it straight-forward to build-in API from the start in new projects.

Basically, it includes middleware support for parsing JSON into request.POST, in addition to serializing the returned context to JSON or rendering a template/redirecting conditionally based on the request type.