Daniel Roy Greenfeld

Daniel Roy Greenfeld

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Choosing an API framework for Django

First off, out of the box, Django lets you construct API responses with a little work. All you need to do is something like this:

# Copied from https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/class-based-views/#more-than-just-html
from django import http
from django.utils import simplejson as json

class JSONResponseMixin(object):
    def render_to_response(self, context):
        "Returns a JSON response containing 'context' as payload"
        return self.get_json_response(self.convert_context_to_json(context))

    def get_json_response(self, content, **httpresponse_kwargs):
        "Construct an `HttpResponse` object."
        return http.HttpResponse(content,
                                 content_type='application/json',
                                 **httpresponse_kwargs)

    def convert_context_to_json(self, context):
        "Convert the context dictionary into a JSON object"
        # Note: This is *EXTREMELY* naive; in reality, you'll need
        # to do much more complex handling to ensure that arbitrary
        # objects -- such as Django model instances or querysets
        # -- can be serialized as JSON.
        return json.dumps(context)

Once you get that mixin, use it in your views like so:

# modified from djangoproject.com sample code
from django.utils import simplejson as json

class JSONDetailView(JSONResponseMixin, MyCustomUserView):
    def convert_context_to_json(self, context):

        context['objects'] = User.objects.values('first_name','last_name','is_active')
        return json.dumps(context)

This works pretty well in a number of simple cases, but doing things like pagination, posting of data, metadata, API discovery, and other important things ends up being a bit more work. This is where the resource oriented API frameworks come in.

What makes a decent API Framework?

These features:

  • pagination
  • posting of data with validation
  • Publishing of metadata along with querysets
  • API discovery
  • proper HTTP response handling
  • caching
  • serialization
  • throttling
  • permissions
  • authentication

Proper API frameworks also need:

  • Really good test coverage of their code
  • Decent performance
  • Documentation
  • An active community to advance and support the framework

If you take these factors, at this time there are only two API frameworks worth using, django-tastypie and django-rest-framework.

Which one is better? django-tastypie or django-rest-framework?

I say they are equal.

You simply can't go wrong with either one. The authors and communities behind both of them are active, the code is solid and tested. And here are my specific thoughts about both of them:

django-tastypie

Using django-tastypie is like playing with pure Python while using the Django ORM. I find it very comfortable. Seems really fast too. The documentation is incredible, and I rarely have any problems figuring anything out. It also supports OAuth 1.0a out of the box, which is mighty awesome these days.

In fact, I wrote a custom OAuth2 handler for django-tastypie for consumer.io that I'm working to extract for publication.

django-rest-framework

As it's based off Django 1.3 style Class Based Views (CBVs), it has a very familiar pattern. Actually, because of the quality of the documentation, I really prefer using django-rest-framework CBVs more than using Django's actual CBVs.

Maybe I should make an HTML renderer for django-rest-framework? :-)

But what about django-piston?

Don't use django-piston.

I don't want to say anything negative, but let's face it: django-piston is dead. Besides a critical security release last year, nothing has been done for it in about 3 years. The documentation is weak, the code mostly untested, and the original author left. He has gone on to do some amazing things. Django-piston was amazing in its time, but its time has passed and so should you.

The only reason for using django-piston for years has been that it supported OAuth, but django-tastypie now addresses that use case. I've used django-tastypie's basic OAuth class and rolled custom Authentication modules to support some extra OAuth flavors and found it wonderful.

Use django-tastypie or django-rest-framework instead. You'll be much, much happier for it.


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Tags: python django api review
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