Adding REST to Django

SLott_10661 0
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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.

rest apache django python
11 Answers

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
Ali_283800

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.

Sam_Corder_23510

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?

hasen_j_353640

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.

user_130550

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

user_29080
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