Django and REST -- Tastypie vs. Django REST

Ouch. What a difficult question.

Lazyweb: Django REST Framework vs. Tastypie. Thoughts? #django
— Joe Dougherty (@modusjonens) February 17, 2014

This isn't easy.

Comparing http://django-tastypie.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ with http://www.django-rest-framework.org is hard. They're both outstanding projects with a long history.

Trivial Follow-up Question 1: What are the requirements?

I happen to know, however, a bit about the context, so I suspect that the requirements center around super-flexible data access and numerous serialization formats.

History

My initial reaction is "Django-REST" of course. Mostly because I started with this several years ago and spent some time tweaking and adjusting my local copy. Our requirements involved adapting Django (and Django-REST) to use Forge Rock Open AM for authentication.

One feature that we didn't need was a sophisticated set of built-in transactions that covered the full REST spectrum of GET, PUT, POST and DELETE. 90% of our processing was GET with an occasional POST.

The other feature we didn't need was a trivial mapping from the Django object model. Our GET processing required view functions as mediation between our database models and the "published" model available through the RESTful API.

Since we needed so little, we hacked out the essential serialization feature set to support our GET operations.

Serialization

Considering the context of the initial question, I think that serialization is the deciding factor. Comparing the serialization features seems to indicate that the following summary may be relevant.

Tastypie serialization is simpler. The support for XML, YAML, JSON, etc., is simple.

Django-REST serialization+render is quite a bit more sophisticated and more flexible. The process is explicitly decomposed into serialization (for breaking down the model objects) and rendering in some external representation like XML, JSON, YAML, etc.

This two-step breakdown in Django-REST seems to make an open data project work out nicely. The developers should find it easier to integrate and publish data from a variety of sources.