RESTful APIs for Django projects/apps

Question

What do you prefer when you want to "RESTify" your Django project in Django?

I came to the conclusion that there are really three options to do that:

• django-piston http://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home
• django-rest-interface http://code.google.com/p/django-rest-interface/
• django-restful-resources http://watchitlater.com/blog/2010/02/django-restful-resources/

Right way to do this for me would be to try all of'em and pick the one that is best for me, so meanwhile I'd like to hear yours...

Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm most familiar with django-piston, so I would naturally steer you in that direction.

A quick glance at the other two, though, indicates that django-rest-interface does nothing more than expose models as resources, and that django-restful-resources is some guy's one-off attempt at the same.

Piston, if I recall correctly, grew out of bitbucket.org's own site development, and allows a lot of flexibility - you can return almost any object from your resource's access methods, not just model instances, and it will be properly encoded. It also has built-in support for some nice features, like form validation (if you can get it to work right, anyway) and request throttling, among other things.

Answer 2

With the new class-based generic views in django 1.3 it will be super-easy to implement your own rest interface, with custom serializers and deserializers, replicating the almost complete piston's implementation using just stock code. I made a View(1.3)-based rest module in 500 lines of code, with generic RESTful resource class and sub resources, natural key support for associations, json and XML serialization and more. the module is really tailored upon my app's requirements

I did it to overcome a couple of limitations in piston's code, like having a query set modified (e.g. With .values(...)) before the handler calling .get() on it, or not being able to use a model's method in serialization.

If you do it as you need it, in a couple of days you'll have a working set of classes and mixins, that you will fully understand and be in control of.