In this post, I am going to talk about Django Rest Framework or DRF. DRF is used to create RESTful APIs in Django which later could be consumed by various apps; mobile, web, desktop, etc. We will be discussing how to install DRF on your machine and then will be writing our APIs for a system.

Before we discuss DRF, let’s talk a bit about REST itself.

What is Rest

From Wikipedia

Representational state transfer (REST)_ is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, called RESTful Web services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. RESTful Web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of Web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of Web services, such as SOAP Web services, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations.[1]_

Rest API(Application Programming Interface) is a client-server architecture that is stateless and used a typical URL scheme for data exchange. It was first presented by Roy Fielding in 2000 in his famous dissertation. The URL that is used to provide communication between a client and server is often called an endpoint. Different HTTP methods are used for this purpose:

• GET:- it returns the requested data which could be a list of records or a single record.
• POST:- It creates a new record.
• PUT/PATCH:- It updates an existing record.
• DELETE; It deletes the record.

The returned data could either be in XML, JSON, or other formats but the first two are most common.

OK, now you have learned a bit about REST API, let’s discuss Django Rest Framework itself.

What is Django Rest Framework

Django Rest Framework is an open-source framework to write RESTful APIs in Python. It is based on the Django framework so knowledge of Django is quite beneficial though not necessary.

So we are going to make APIs for a contact management system where a user will be able to use our APIs to create/update and delete contacts. The returned data will be in JSON format.

#rest-api #django #django-rest-framework #python