Delicious REST APIs with Django and Tastypie

sanket.__doc__

• Part designer, part hacker, full-time geek
• Co-founder at doselect and CampusHash
• Have spoken at more than 50 events across
  the country
• Active volunteer at India's Python community
• Frontman of Quantum Chaos, an alternative
  rock band

What is REST?

What is REST?

• Resource-oriented
• DRY
• Cache-ready
• Stateless

Methods

• Safe methods
  • GET, HEAD, TRACE, OPTIONS
• Unsafe methods
  • PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE
• Control methods
  • CONNECT

Status Codes

• 1xx - Informational Messages
• 2xx - Success
• 3xx - Redirection
• 4xx - Client Error ("You messed up!")
• 5xx - Server Error ("I messed up!")

Resources

Resources

• An abstraction of some entity, or a collection of entities, that we can identify by a name
• "all quotes created by user 1"
• "all quotes modified between October 12th, 2014 and October 15th, 2014"
• On the web, we use Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)

Representations

• In order to interact with a resource, we use a representation of that resource
• Representations contain data and metadata
• Resources are abstract, representations are concrete
• Representations are the actual bytes that are transferred between clients and servers, including metadata

Representations

GET /api/v1/quote/l8rdp

200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
{
	author: "/api/v1/author/albus-dumbledore"
	created: "Fri, 17 Oct 2014 20:33:19 +0000"
	quote: "Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him."
	resource_uri: "/api/v1/quote/l8rdp"
	uid: "l8rdp"
}

		

The Good Parts

1. Uses the REST methods and status codes properly
2. Round trippable data
   • Anything you can GET, you can POST/PUT
3. Super-flexible serialization
   • JSON, JSONP, XML, YAML, HTML
4. Fully HATEOAS compatible
5. Extensibility is a core feature

HATEOAS?

1. Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State
2. The user shouldn't have to know anything in advance about the data
3. Complete explorability and deep-linking of data
4. RESTful interaction is driven by hypermedia, rather than out-of-band information
5. Decouples client and server in a way that allows the server functionality to evolve independently

The Dehydrate Cycle

1. Put the data model into a Bundle instance, which is then passed through the various methods.
2. Run through all fields on the Resource, letting each field perform its own dehydrate method on the bundle.
3. While processing each field, look for a dehydrate_ method on the Resource. If it’s present, call it with the bundle.
4. Finally, after all fields are processed, if the dehydrate method is present on the Resource, it is called & given the entire bundle.