[Mailman-Developers] GSOC 2013 : Authenticated REST-API in Postorius/Django

[Rahul Gaur]

Hi ,

Sorry for the late reply , I have been out of the city and I came back to
the college yesterday only .

Welcome to our community,
>

 Glad to be a part of the community ,  I hope to contribute towards the
development of Gnu Mailman :)


>
> I'm happy to see that you are interested in the REST interfaces.
> In addition to TastyPie, I suggest that you also look at
> django-rest-framework.
> Please compare the two and let us know what you see as the advantages and
> disadvantages of each.
>
> Richard
>
>
So , last night I tried my hand on django-rest-framework [0]  and TastyPie
[1] as well.

What I could figure out with my two quick and dirty hands on applications
of both the frameworks , the django-rest-framework is a bit more lengthy (
but those few extra lines are for the best) when stacked up against
Tastypie.

I wrote this quick django app and then I tried to write API's for that app
in both the framework.Both the frameworks have there own advantages lets
talk about that.

Lets talk about the django-rest-framework, this was the first framework I
tried and so I started from the scratch.So for my toy app , I referred the
tutorial(I felt it's better documented than TastyPie ) and started writing
the code.By the time I was done ,I could do lot of things with it.Biggest
advantage it has over the TastyPie is this one :


*$ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/formpost/ -H 'Accept:text/html'
>                                                      *



The Django-rest-frameworks  API's returns web browsable representation of
the data by default :)
I find this to be a lot more useful in the scenario where I am developing a
new app from the scratch.
Plus the default frontend is done with bootstrap , which makes it easier to
customize as per the requirements as well.

Now , I would use TastyPie for an existing django project/app which has a
web interface and I just need API's so I can provide third party support
for my Project. TastyPie  is kind of more easy to get started with as
compared to Django-rest-framework.


I highly recommend Leonard Richardson's and Sam Ruby's O'Reilly book on
> RESTful Web Services:
> http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529260.do
> Although the book's been out for many years now, I still think it holds up
> well, and will give you a great understanding of the basic concepts and
> design
> principles behind REST.  It also gives lots of great tips for organizing
> your
> resources, etc.


Thanks for recommending this book, I have started going through it .

Of course, it makes the most sense for the authenticated REST API to as
> closely mimic the core admin API as possible.

 Where there are conflicts, we
> should discuss on this mailing list.
> Cheers,
> -Barry



So , the confusion I am facing here is that the Postorius is already mature
and stable app and while playing with the two frameworks for API's  what I
figured out is that if I opt for django-rest-framework , I would need to
write new Views ?
But if I go for TastyPie , I won't have to touch the existing Views and
write authenticated API's.

Hence to implement authenticated API's , which one would be better ?



[0] - https://github.com/aregee/restful
[1] - https://github.com/aregee/restpie

Cheers !

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*Rahul Gaur*
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