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diff --git a/docs/howto/alternativeframeworks.rst b/docs/howto/alternativeframeworks.rst index c6eba1dd..dc8d1ea6 100644 --- a/docs/howto/alternativeframeworks.rst +++ b/docs/howto/alternativeframeworks.rst @@ -1,6 +1,35 @@ -Alternative Frameworks -====================== +Alternative frameworks & Why Django REST framework +================================================== -#. `django-piston <https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home>`_ is excellent, and has a great community behind it. This project is based on piston code in parts. +Alternative frameworks +---------------------- -#. `django-tasypie <https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie>`_ is also well worth looking at. +There are a number of alternative REST frameworks for Django: + +* `django-piston <https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home>`_ is very mature, and has a large community behind it. This project was originally based on piston code in parts. +* `django-tasypie <https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie>`_ is also very good, and has a very active and helpful developer community and maintainers. +* Other interesting projects include `dagny <https://github.com/zacharyvoase/dagny>`_ and `dj-webmachine <http://benoitc.github.com/dj-webmachine/>`_ + + +Why use Django REST framework? +------------------------------ + +The big benefits of using Django REST framework come down to: + +1. It's based on Django's class based views, which makes it simple, modular, and future-proof. +2. It stays as close as possible to Django idioms and language throughout. +3. The browse-able API makes working with the APIs extremely quick and easy. + + +Why was this project created? +----------------------------- + +For me the browse-able API is the most important aspect of Django REST framework. + +I wanted to show that Web APIs could easily be made Web browse-able, +and demonstrate how much better browse-able Web APIs are to work with. + +Being able to navigate and use a Web API directly in the browser is a huge win over only having command line and programmatic +access to the API. It enables the API to be properly self-describing, and it makes it much much quicker and easier to work with. +There's no fundamental reason why the Web APIs we're creating shouldn't be able to render to HTML as well as JSON/XML/whatever, +and I really think that more Web API frameworks *in whatever language* ought to be taking a similar approach. |