Django and Restful APIs

I have been struggling with choosing a methodology for creating a RESTful API with Django. None of the approaches I've tried seem to be the "silver" bullet. WAPI from http://fi.am is probably the closest to what I would like to accomplish, however I am not sure if it is acceptable in a true RESTful API to have parameters that are resource identifiers be in the querystring instead of in a "clean" URL format. Any suggestions for modifying WAPIs RestBinding.PATTERN to "clean" up the URLs? Another option I've explored is Django-Rest-Interface. However this framework seems to violate one of the most important pieces I need, and that is to include the full resource URL for references to other resources (see http://jacobian.org/writing/rest-worst-practices/ Improper Use of Links). The final option is to use django-multiresponse and basically do it the long way.

Please offer me your best advice, especially people that have dealt with this decision.

Solution 1:

For Django, besides tastypie and piston, django-rest-framework is a promising one worth mentioning. I've already migrated one of my projects on it smoothly.

Django REST framework is a lightweight REST framework for Django, that aims to make it easy to build well-connected, self-describing RESTful Web APIs.

Quick example:

from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns, url
from djangorestframework.resources import ModelResource
from djangorestframework.views import ListOrCreateModelView, InstanceModelView
from myapp.models import MyModel

class MyResource(ModelResource):
    model = MyModel

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^$', ListOrCreateModelView.as_view(resource=MyResource)),
    url(r'^(?P<pk>[^/]+)/$', InstanceModelView.as_view(resource=MyResource)),
)

Take the example from the official site, all above codes provide api, self explained documentation (like soap based webservice) and even sandboxing for testing. Very convenient.

Links: http://django-rest-framework.org/

Solution 2:

I believe the recently released django-piston is now the best solution for creating a proper REST interface in Django. django-piston

Note: django-piston seems to no longer be maintained (see comments below)