Question

Why would you use one over the other, for exposing an API for your Django app?

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/djangorestframework/

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-tastypie

Answer 1

As the author of django-rest-framework, I’ve got an obvious bias 😉 but my hopefully-fairly-objective opinion on this is something like:

TastyPie

• As Torsten noted, you’re not going to go far wrong with something written by the same peeps as the awesome django-haystack. From what I’ve seen on their mailing list Daniel Lindsey et al are super-helpful, and Tastypie is stable, comprehensive and well documented
• Excels in giving you a sensible set of default behaviour and making building an API with that style incredibly easy.

Django REST framework

• Gives you HTML browse-able self-describing APIs. (EG, see the tutorial API.) Being able to navigate and interact with the API directly in the browser is a big usability win.
• Tries to stay close to Django idioms throughout – built on top of Django’s class based views, etc… (Whereas TastyPie came along before Django’s CBVs existed, so uses it’s own class-based views implementation)
• I’d like to think that the underlying architecture is pretty nicely built, decoupled etc…

In any case, both are good. I would probably characterise Tastypie as giving you a sensible set of defaults out of the box, and REST framework as being very nicely decoupled and flexible. If you’re planning on investing a lot of time in the API, I’d def recommend browsing through the docs & codebase of each and trying to get a feel for which suits you more.

Obviously, there’s also the ‘Why TastyPie?’ section in it’s README, and the ‘REST framework 3’.

See also Daniel Greenfeld’s blog post on Choosing an API framework for Django, from May 2012 (Worth noting that this was still a few months before the big REST framework 2.0 release).

Also a couple of threads on Reddit with folks asking this same question, from Dec 2013 and July 2013.