A set of class-based views, mixins and utilities, which will transparently manage serialization, deserialization and other aspects of RESTful resources based off a Django site's models.
The views are based off Django 1.3 Class-Based-Views, so Django 1.3 is needed or a backport of the relevant classes.
See the documentation for in-depth description of the available options.
I used to use piston for a number of projects, and I found a couple of limitations it its architecture, and other aprts I didn't need at all.
On the other side, Django 1.3 introduces class-based views, and they seem to be a more natural candidate to base a restful interface upon. With CBVs, one can cut into any point of the request process, and change the behavior.
As an example, in piston it's not possible to use a ValuesQuerySet in a read-object
request, only in read-collection. With our approach, a subclass may
override get_query_set() and still have it applied when getting
a single object.
The RestfulResource class is a generic view, so it can be used as-is in your urlconf module:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
('^users(/(?P<pk>\d+))?(?P<format>\.\w+)?,
RestfulResource.as_view(model=User)
),
('^posts(/(?P<slug>\d+))?(?P<format>\.\w+)?,
RestfulResource.as_view(model=Post)
),
...
)
Of course the power of these views resides in the ability to subclass them, and to reuse the pieces to build limited-scope versions (e.g. let XML out)
The format for response serialization is taken from the format kwarg of
the view, as configured in the url module. It can optionally start with a
single dot, which is ignored.
The choice beween collection and item representation is done like in Django
Class-Based-Views: if there is a kwarg pk or slug and it is not
None, then the corresponding item is retrieved, else the collection,
using the provided queryset and optional filters.
Filters can be extracted from the GET parameters, using a list of
LookupParameter instances in the get_lookups or kwargs_lookups
class attribute.
Fields for serialization can be defined once for all or depending on a special GET parameter, which will select among a set of predefined choices.