Lightweight Django

Chapter 4. Building a REST API

It’s been over a decade since Roy Fielding, an American computer scientist and one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, introduced REpresentational State Transfer (REST) as an architectural style. Over the years, REST has gained momentum thanks to its popularity for building web services.

By being stateless, and creating unique identifiers for allowing caching, layering, and scalability, REST APIs make use of existing HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE) to create, update, and remove new resources. The term REST is often abused to describe any URL that returns JSON instead of HTML. What most users do not realize is that to be a RESTful architecture the web service must satisfy formal constraints. In particular, the application must be separated into a client-server model and the server must remain completely stateless. No client context may be stored on the server and resources should also be uniquely and uniformly identified. The client also should be able to navigate the API and transition state through the use of links and metadata in the resource responses. The client should not assume the existence of resources or actions other than a few fixed entry points, such as the root of the API.

In this chapter, we’ll walk through how to utilize the power of RESTful architecture with Django.

Django and REST

Combining Django with REST is a common practice for creating data-rich websites. There are numerous reusable applications in the Django ...