Dagny: Rails-style Resource-Oriented Architecture for Django

http://github.com/zacharyvoase/dagny

by zacharyvoase • 16 years ago

19 6 16 years ago

github.com

tworats2• 16 years ago

Comparisons to django-piston and motivation for creating this library would be helpful.

zacharyvoase3• 16 years ago

FYI: I’m working on a pretty full suite of documentation at the moment, since the README has become a bit overloaded.

The motivation for creating this library was pretty simple: I really like the Rails way of modeling the application around resources, and then ’mounting’ those resources at URLs with the absolute minimum necessary amount of code. This resource-oriented approach is key in building truly ‘RESTful’ web services.

I wanted a simple but powerful content negotiation mechanism, which effectively gave me a comprehensive ‘API’ with zero additional effort. I think I’ve achieved that here; for example, adding JSON output support to a specific action is usually a 3-line affair, or you could very easily write a generic renderer and enable it for all actions across your entire site.

Finally, even though the Rails inspiration was so strong, I needed to keep Dagny as consistent as possible with the practices and idioms of the Python and Django communities. Again, I think I’ve done pretty well in that regard.

In response to your other question, I think Piston is a great library—however, I think the idea that you have to define an API separately from the rest of your site is just the wrong way to do things. I’m also not a big fan of Piston’s architecture and resulting API; it’s not as polished as I’d like it to be (although that’s more of a cosmetic issue).

numix• 16 years ago

Did you check out Tastypie (http://toastdriven.github.com/django-tastypie/)? It is also RESTful, and explores some similar ideas as a replacement for Piston, but approaches it in a manner similar to Django models.

tworats2• 16 years ago

I've gone back and forth on this but generally come back to liking piston's approach - it's worked out to be smarter than everything I've hacked up myself. I have yet to try the unified approach where the html and api views are the same underlying code, but I can see where it has appeal. I could also see where it would get hairy. Will have to try it.

I didn't see anything about authentication. Thoughts on OAuth, basic auth?

I'd love a nice API enabler for simpler non-django frameworks such as flask as well...

zacharyvoase3• 16 years ago

Dagny now has some proper HTML reference documentation: http://zacharyvoase.github.com/dagny/

The tutorial is very much a WIP though.

Dagny: Rails-style Resource-Oriented Architecture for Django

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