Adding REST to Django [closed]

I've got a Django application that works nicely. I'm adding REST services. I'm looking for some additional input on my REST strategy.

Here are some examples of things I'm wringing my hands over.

• Right now, I'm using the Django-REST API with a pile of patches.
• I'm thinking of falling back to simply writing view functions in Django that return JSON results.
• I can also see filtering the REST requests in Apache and routing them to a separate, non-Django server instance.

Please nominate one approach per answer so we can vote them up or down.

Solution 1:

I'm thinking of falling back to simply writing view functions in Django that return JSON results.

• Explicit
• Portable to other frameworks
• Doesn't require patching Django

Solution 2:

Please note that REST does not just mean JSON results. REST essentially means exposing a resource-oriented API over native but full-fledged HTTP. I am not an expert on REST, but here are a few of the things Rails is doing.

• URLs should be good, simple names for resources
• Use the right HTTP methods
  • HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE
  • Optionally with an override (form parameter '_method' will override HTTP request-method)
• Support content-type negotiation via Accept request-header
  • Optionally with an override (filename extension in the URL will override MIME-type in the Accept request-header)
  • Available content types should include XML, XHTML, HTML, JSON, YAML, and many others as appropriate

For example, to get the native HTTP support going, the server should respond to

GET /account/profile HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Accept: application/json

as it would respond to

GET /account/profile.json HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

And it should respond to

PUT /account/profile HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

var=value

as it would respond to

POST /account/profile HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

_method=PUT&var=value

Solution 3:

For anyone else looking for a very decent, pluggable API application for Django, make sure you checkout jespern's django-piston which is used internally at BitBucket.

It's well maintained, has a great following and some cool forks which do things like add support for pagination and other authentication methods (OAuth is supported out of the box).

Updated to reflect that django-piston is no longer maintained.