Consuming a RESTful API with Django

Question

I'm building a Django application that needs to interact with a 3rd party RESTful API, making various GETs, PUTs, etc to that resource. What I'm looking for is a good way to represent that API within Django.

The most obvious, but perhaps less elegant solution seems to be creating a model that has various methods mapping to webservice queries. On the other hand, it seems that using something like a custom DB backend would provide more flexibility and be better integrated into Django's ORM.

Caveat: This is the first real project I've done with Django, so it's possible I'm missing something obvious here.

Answer 1

The requests library makes it easy to write a REST API consumer. There is also a Python library called slumber, which is built on top of requests, for the explicit purpose of consuming REST APIs. How well that will work for you likely depends on how RESTful the API really is.

Answer 2

Make the REST calls using the builtin urllib (a bit clunky but functional) and wrap the interface into a class, with a method for each remote call. Your class can then translate to and from native python types. That is what I'd do anyway!