Django or Django Rest Framework

Question

I have made a certain app in Django, and I know that Django Rest Framework is used for building APIs. However, when I started to read about Django Rest Framework on their websit

Answer 1

Django Rest Framework makes it easy to use your Django Server as an REST API.

REST stands for "representational state transfer" and API stands for application programming interface.

You can build a restful api using regular Django, but it will be very tidious. DRF makes everything easy. For comparison, here is simple GET-view using just regular Django, and one using Django Rest Framework:

Regular:

from django.core.serializers import serialize
from django.http import HttpResponse


class SerializedListView(View):
    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        qs = MyObj.objects.all()
        json_data = serialize("json", qs, fields=('my_field', 'my_other_field'))
        return HttpResponse(json_data, content_type='application/json')

And with DRF this becomes:

from rest_framework import generics


class MyObjListCreateAPIView(generics.ListCreateAPIView):
    permission_classes = [permissions.IsAuthenticatedOrReadOnly]
    serializer_class = MyObjSerializer

Note that with DRF you easily have list and create views as well as authentication.