REST framework 2 released: Simple, beautiful, browsable Web APIs for Django

http://django-rest-framework.org/topics/rest-framework-2-announcement.html

by tomchristie • 14 years ago

153 58 14 years ago

django-rest-framework.org

vital101• 14 years ago

If you're looking for a framework for creating REST APIs in Django, TastyPie is also worth a look.

https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie

sapien• 14 years ago

Very much so; when I was in the market for a REST app, I found tastypie very clean to work with for adding on to an existing project. (all the major options should be on djangopackages.com)

dev3605• 14 years ago

+1. We started with django rest framework and it was a disaster.

The class-based approach gave very little practical reuse, and it was not granular enough to allow us to easily add validation rules or customize the fields to return from a model. Lots of ugly code where you had to concern yourself with response codes.. I mean whats the point with a framework if you have to concern yourself with response codes? Isn't it the frameworks role to abstract away these details?

Most of my beef with the framework has to do with the design. It has abstraction in all the wrong places ... Inversion of Control (IoC) just seem like a complete afterthought in the entire design.

Now with Tastypie, I will admit it has a steep learning curve, and a conceptual overhead, but it does a much better job of abstracting away the internals and you end up with a much more correct and consistent REST implementation. In addition, it is better architected which makes it easier to extract base classes and override behavior, which is valuable if you need it to work really well with non DB models.

I will say that deep down I'm not really happy with either alternatives though. Tastypie requires too much code to get up and running and it takes too much time to get confident with it. Will def. take a look at the other frameworks mentioned in this discussion.

tomchristie7• 14 years ago

Seriously, take a look a 2.0 - it's a huge, huge step up from the previous version, practically every aspect has been reworked and redesigned.

The initial version made some design compromises in order to support the Browseable API, and didn't take full advantage of Django's generic CBV's. (Since it was released when Django was still at 1.2) REST framework 2 fixes all that and much, much more.

I'd throughly recommend spending a while walking through the tutorial and taking a browse around the docs - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

dmishe• 14 years ago

I would seriously argue about granularity in tastypie. Anything more that default behavior and you have to override high level methods, and some times even copy paste implementation because there is no way to override

CoffeeDregs2• 14 years ago

I've used and like Tasty-Pie, but did find its magic in mapping models to endpoints a little too magical when I needed to build endpoints with even mildly complex filters/sorts/calculations. I was pretty quickly lost when digging through the code to figure out how tasty-pie did its magic. I recently selected rest-framework because, while it does provide help, it wasn't too magical and was fairly straightforward.

jaytaylor3• 14 years ago

TastyPie is great for getting started, but scaling it is painful - out of the box, the queries it does are very inefficient.

josh_blum• 14 years ago

How are they inefficient? I'm designing an app right now and am looking at different frameworks to use. Any recommendations?

jarcoal• 14 years ago

I just released a small REST API framework for Django as well: https://github.com/jarcoal/django-sliver

It's built entirely on CBVs, so if you're familiar with them, you will feel right at home.

The API is not frozen, so it's not production ready yet.

almost2• 14 years ago

A very much needed add-on for Django. It's cool to see the amount of work that's been put into making version 2 great!

dbrgn• 14 years ago

As Tastypie has already been mentioned, and as it's probably REST Framework 2's main competitor – how do the two compare?

madrox• 14 years ago

We use DRF 1 for all our APIs. Very excited to give DRF 2 a whirl.

misiti3780• 14 years ago

Any chance any of these REST libs are going to support mongodb? If one already does, can someone provide a reference?

fatiherikli• 14 years ago

https://github.com/fatiherikli/tastypie-mongodb-resource

tomchristie7• 14 years ago

REST framework's serialization isn't tied to the ORM, so it should play perfectly well with mongodb.

vitormazzi• 14 years ago

I use it with mongoengine (drf 0.44). I only had to implement the resource serialization logic.

The framework is great, the best I have tried.

bmelton5• 14 years ago

In addition to native Django ORM calls (to whatever DB you're using), we've also used tastypie to surface MongoDB and SOLR search results to REST endpoints.

Edit: I should mention that both were pretty painstaking the first go-around, but mostly due to my ignorance of the platform. I am thankful to know some more seasoned Tastypie users, so getting answers was pretty easy, and the Google Group is really good for Tastypie as well.

senko• 14 years ago

Not happy with Tastypie[0] or DRF[1], we've created another one, basically a simple wrapper around CBVs, for a specific niche (RESTful but not HATEOAS, JSON-only): https://github.com/dobarkod/django-restless (overview&docs at http://django-restless.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ )

So far used it in a couple of our projects, but would welcome feedback.

[0] too much ModelResource magic [1] custom model (de)serialization into multiple formats, browsable api is majority of the framework: IAGNI, and 80% functionality we needed was in 20% of DRF (which is basically what Restless is)

togasystems• 14 years ago

How easy would it be to hook this up to some sort of authentication scheme such as OAuth?

tomchristie7• 14 years ago

Pretty trivial. I'm planning on having integration with django-oauth2-provider added any day now.

Here's the outstanding ticket for OAuth: https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/issues/... There's a link to a gist on there which implements that for REST framework 0.4, which just needs a little updating, testing, and documentation.

camus• 14 years ago

Aren't Class based views "restfull" in Django 1.5 ?

almost2• 14 years ago

They provide some things that are useful for certain aspects of RESTfulness. Mainly making it easier to support the HTTP verbs properly, that's a very far from all there is to RESTful things though and that's where something like Django REST Framework comes in...

tomchristie7• 14 years ago

Note that there's a live version of the tutorial project available for testing here: http://restframework.herokuapp.com/

aidos• 14 years ago

This one is close to my heart at the moment. I'm not a big fan of Django in general as it's just too heavy for my needs but I've tried all the rest libs to try to get something that works for me. I haven't been completely happy with any of them.

So far the closet to happy I've been is with flask-restless - though I'm busy hacking around with that to get it working how I need (it's pretty feature light). It does mean I get to use SQL-Alchemy, which is every different kind of nice.

There's no doubt, designing a powerful and flexible api framework is a challenging job.

Will have a look at this now too, though. I'd definitely rather use something that has some development resource behind it instead of rolling my own.

bruth• 14 years ago

I too wrote a REST app for Django http://bruth.github.com/restlib2/. I took the approach (which I speak about in the "Why?" section) to simply use the API terminologies HTTP already provides. Too many abstractions is a bad idea. For the curious, I've heavily documented Resources class: https://github.com/bruth/restlib2/blob/master/restlib2/resou... I've used it in production for quite some down now, but it is not yet complete.

CoffeeDregs2• 14 years ago

OT?: I wish the tutorial were better. It starts out with maximum complexity (minimal usage of the framework) and then reduces complexity. I skipped to the last page to try to see if DRF would actually save me time.

Compare to TastyPie where a functional API is built with very few lines of code and right near the top of the tutorial: http://django-tastypie.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial.ht...

jeromeparadis• 14 years ago

Personally, I like the approach of the tutorial.

It starts with the amount of code you would usually write if you were to write an API by hand and then simplifies things along the road. At the end it makes it clear how the framework can be simple to use while you've learned how to use it behind the hood if the magic needs tweaking.

juaninfinitelop• 14 years ago

Since everyone is sharing the django-rest framework they are using, I'll chime in with my choice:

Django-Piston

https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home

I have not used any other frameworks but will be trying ops suggestion.

vaf• 14 years ago

Django-Piston is not longer being worked on. It may be risky to use a tool that isn't being regularly maintained.

goronbjorn• 14 years ago

I still think Flask a much better choice for RESTful APIs when it comes to Python. It's a lot more lightweight, and companies like Twilio have done a lot to make building APIs with Flask very easy: http://flask-restful.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

zerop• 14 years ago

One newbie question: Why do I need a REST framework? I am able to create get/post APIs with what django offers. What would I need REST frameworks for django?

bmelton5• 14 years ago

A couple of reasons I switched to entirely REST-based apps:

In case you want to provide an API to other users who aren't going to be making native Django calls.

In case your app is going to be based on Backbone (which maps models endpoints to REST endpoints, to oversimplify things.)

In case you need to consume your app from a mobile app, or external site, or whatever.

In case you want to surface your data in any way without having to give read/write access to the database directly -- you can implement REST and API Token authentication that maps to users so that they can read and write to the data that they have access to, but no more.

reddit_clone• 14 years ago

>API Token authentication

Could you give some pointers/links about how this is done?

I have used REST internally with no authentication. But I am not sure how these can be exposed to outside in a secure manner.

adhipg• 14 years ago

It solves a few problems like serialisation and enabling browsable APIs which makes it easier to both develop APIs and let others consume them. For me, the second part is more important than the first.

megaman8212• 14 years ago

This looks pretty good. I like that it leverages Django's CBVs. I couldn't tell from the docs if you could do queryset filtering though the URL's querystring (e.g http://api.example.com/blogs?author=10).

tomchristie7• 14 years ago

If using the generic CBVs you can override .get_queryset() to implement filtering just as you would with regular Django CBVs.

There's also an outstanding pull req to build in support for django-filter and other filtering backends which now just needs some docs, and which I plan to have merged in within the next few days or so. https://github.com/tomchristie/django-rest-framework/pull/29... That'll make it easier to do more complex filtering stuff. (And eventually have the filters be presented in the Browsable API)

megaman8212• 14 years ago

I have a mixin that often use to do basic querystring filtering with CBVs, but it is nowhere near as comprehensive as http://django-tastypie.readthedocs.org/en/latest/resources.h....

albedoa2• 14 years ago

"Most people just make the mistake that it should be simple to design simple things. In reality, the effort required to design something is inversely proportional to the simplicity of the result."

Sort of off-topic, but did Mr. Fielding mean to say either "inversely proportional to the complexity" or "proportional to the simplicity"? This quote implies that as effort increases, simplicity decreases, which seems out of spirit with the context of the quote.

njharman• 14 years ago

No. Simple things are hard to create.

albedoa2• 14 years ago

Yes, we understand what he means to say, but his words say the opposite.

He meant to say: "As effort increases, simplicity increases."

He instead said: "As effort increases, simplicity decreases."

bmelton5• 14 years ago

I'm fairly entrenched with Tastypie at the moment, but I've always been jealous of REST Framework's "document at the endpoint" setup.

Can I ask how you're determining whether or not the client is making an API call vs visiting the page directly? It'd be great to be able to supply Document templates that surface like REST Framework does, but I can't make out whether you're checking the client, the action, the protocol or something altogether different.

tomchristie7• 14 years ago

It uses the client's 'Accept:' header which specifies which media types it prefers for the response (eg. 'text/html', 'application/json')

Browsers will indicate that they prefer HTML, so that's what REST framework serves them.

bmelton5• 14 years ago

So obvious, I'm embarrassed I didn't think of it first.

Much thanks!

samwilliams• 14 years ago

Any chance we can add 'Django' to the front of the title please? 'REST framework 2 released' is a little misleading. The article is titled 'Django REST framework 2' any, so it would be more consistent anyway.

ppadron• 14 years ago

If you need to stick with Ruby for whatever reason, I recommend using Grape.

https://github.com/intridea/grape

klibertp• 14 years ago

I recently discovered REST framework for Python and... Twisted! It's so cute, I couldn't resist and actually used it to write a proxy for Google Refine reconciliation and url fetching functionality (for speedup and easier data manipulation) and it worked. Worked very well! Here it is for those interested: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/CorePost/0.0.16

jtchang• 14 years ago

How easy is it for me to upgrade? I have been using Django REST framework for a while and this upgrade path seems scary. I looked at the migration guide but it doesn't say anything about what I should be specifically concerned with.

tomchristie7• 14 years ago

There's so much work has gone into REST framework 2 that it's hard to present a single definitive migration guide. Best way to get an idea of migration plan would be to work your way through the tutorial first to get an idea of how everything fits together. You will need to put a little bit of work in, but it'll be time very well spent. Any questions at all just head over to https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/django-re... or try #restframework on freenode IRC.

REST framework 2 released: Simple, beautiful, browsable Web APIs for Django

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