tastypie Coding with Tastypie Why Tastypie?

Example

There are other API frameworks out there for Django. You need to assess the options available and decide for yourself. That said, here are some common reasons for tastypie.

• You need an API that is RESTful and uses HTTP well.
• You want to support deep relations.
• You DON’T want to have to write your own serializer to make the output right.
• You want an API framework that has little magic, very flexible and maps well to the problem domain.
• You want/need XML serialization that is treated equally to JSON (and YAML is there too).

To develop API with Django, we have many options. The main options are Tastypie and Django Rest Framework(DRF).

What makes a decent API Framework?

These features:

1. pagination
2. posting of data with validation
3. Publishing of metadata along with querysets
4. API discovery
5. proper HTTP response handling
6. caching
7. serialization
8. throttling
9. permissions
10. authentication

Proper API frameworks also need:

11. Really good test coverage of their code

12. Decent performance

13. Documentation

14. An active community to advance and support the framework

If you take these factors, at this time there are only two API frameworks worth using (depends in user views), django-tastypie and django-rest-framework.

Which one is better? django-tastypie or django-rest-framework?

I say they are equal. You simply can't go wrong with either one. The authors and communities behind both of them are active, the code is solid and tested. And here are my specific thoughts about both of them:

Tastypie:

Advantages:

• Easy to get started with and provide basic functionalities OOB (out of the box)
• Most of the time you won’t be dealing with Advanced Django concepts like CBVs, Forms etc
• More readable code and less of magic!
• If your models are NON-ORM, go for it.

Disadvantages:

• Doesn’t strictly follow idiomatic Django (mind well python and django’s philosophies are quite different)
• Probably bit tough to customize APIs once you go big
• No O-Auth

DRF:

Advantages:

• Follow idiomatic django. (If you know django inside out, and very comfortable with CBV, Forms etc without any doubt go for it)

• Provides out of the box REST functionality using ModelViewSets. At the same time, provides greater control for customization using CustomSerializer, APIView, GenericViews etc.

• Better authentication.

• Easier to write custom permission classes.

• Work very well and importantly very easy to make it work with 3rd party libraries and OAuth.

• DJANGO-REST-AUTH is worth mentioning LIBRARY for Auth/SocialAuthentication/Registration.

Disadvantages:

• If you don’t know Django very well, don’t go for this.
• Magic! Some time very hard to understand magic.
• Because its been written on top of django’s CBV which are in turn quite complex in nature.
• Has steep learning curve.