+1. We started with django rest framework and it was a disaster.

The class-based approach gave very little practical reuse, and it was not granular enough to allow us to easily add validation rules or customize the fields to return from a model. Lots of ugly code where you had to concern yourself with response codes.. I mean whats the point with a framework if you have to concern yourself with response codes? Isn't it the frameworks role to abstract away these details?

Most of my beef with the framework has to do with the design. It has abstraction in all the wrong places ... Inversion of Control (IoC) just seem like a complete afterthought in the entire design.

Now with Tastypie, I will admit it has a steep learning curve, and a conceptual overhead, but it does a much better job of abstracting away the internals and you end up with a much more correct and consistent REST implementation. In addition, it is better architected which makes it easier to extract base classes and override behavior, which is valuable if you need it to work really well with non DB models.

I will say that deep down I'm not really happy with either alternatives though. Tastypie requires too much code to get up and running and it takes too much time to get confident with it. Will def. take a look at the other frameworks mentioned in this discussion.

Seriously, take a look a 2.0 - it's a huge, huge step up from the previous version, practically every aspect has been reworked and redesigned.

The initial version made some design compromises in order to support the Browseable API, and didn't take full advantage of Django's generic CBV's. (Since it was released when Django was still at 1.2) REST framework 2 fixes all that and much, much more.

I'd throughly recommend spending a while walking through the tutorial and taking a browse around the docs - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Thanks - I'll take another look on the next project and see how it compares

I would seriously argue about granularity in tastypie. Anything more that default behavior and you have to override high level methods, and some times even copy paste implementation because there is no way to override

I would argue the contrary.. Maybe you can give some examples? - Are you overriding in the correct places? In the beginning with TastyPie, I would override get_detail and such, often when I should have been overriding obj_get instead..

We are using TastyPie in production on a pretty large site and I've been super happy with it. We have custom fields, custom auth, custom base classes for resources where the underlying data store are non django models, security is very granular (with minimal code overhead) and overall its been a blessing to extend and override. One thing I like in particular is how you can reuse nested Resource definitions, e.g. define a UserResource once and reuse it everywhere a model/resource has a FK to user and you get correct response output. Saves lots of time and gets you a correct, secure implementation.

I've used and like Tasty-Pie, but did find its magic in mapping models to endpoints a little too magical when I needed to build endpoints with even mildly complex filters/sorts/calculations. I was pretty quickly lost when digging through the code to figure out how tasty-pie did its magic. I recently selected rest-framework because, while it does provide help, it wasn't too magical and was fairly straightforward.

Very much so; when I was in the market for a REST app, I found tastypie very clean to work with for adding on to an existing project. (all the major options should be on djangopackages.com)

TastyPie is great for getting started, but scaling it is painful - out of the box, the queries it does are very inefficient.

How are they inefficient? I'm designing an app right now and am looking at different frameworks to use. Any recommendations?

Tasty-Pie is inefficient because if there are 20 resulting records to output from the API, if each record has 2 nested referenced records, TP will end up doing at least 60 queries, 1 query to hydrate each row + 1 query per nested record (but anecdotally for me it's been more like 100 queries to get 10 records due to redundant queries and other miscellaneous things happening). TP does no bulk query optimization and the result is /very/ high query volume.

I have cleaned up a lot of our Tasty-Pie backend and reduced query volume on endpoints which were 100+ queries down to be just 2 or 3 queries- but it was a tremendous amount of work with an ugly result from a complexity and architectural perspective.

I haven't found any Python-based API-in-a-box which I like.

OTOH, I've had much success with Scala + Play-framework + Squeryl - this combination gives fine grained explicit control over what is happening. This approach is generally very easy to scale. However this setup has it's own shortcomings- its always a tradeoff, right?

With Scala + Play, you don't get an API-in-a-box, so you must build it out yourself. It isn't particularly hard, but it definitely doesn't come "for free".

"for free", like TP- but it's only free at first because you will have to do complex and ugly hacks to make it scale.

I'm currently in the middle of a very similar situation. It's fine for dev, but throwing hundreds of queries at a single request just isn't going to scale.

We've ended up with stuff like:

     class Meta(SomeResource.Meta):
            cls = Challenge
     
            select_related_fields = [
                'category', 'owner', 'company', 'bonus', 'reward',
                ]
            prefetch_related_fields = [
                'specialities', 'countries',
                'companies', 'products',
                'groups',
                ]
     
            queryset = (cls.objects
                        .select_related(*select_related_fields)
                        .prefetch_related(*prefetch_related_fields)
                        .all())

which takes some of the pain away, but going through and profiling exactly which prefetches & joins help is a major hassle.

Resources with relations with full=True are also brutal. Manually stuffing only the required extra data speeds things up greatly, but there's too much boilerplate for my liking. Having some level in-between 'full' and 'resource-uri only' would be nice, but I haven't seen any nice way to do it.

These are the problems you have with any Django app as you learn to scale it, they're not inherent to Tastypie. They're why prefetch_related and select_related exist, you're Doing Things Right.

This isn't Right, IMO this is a sloppy mess of a way to develop a scalable API, and only lets you barely eek by. There is no joy.

I wish that I had a better response for this. I don't. Scaling is hard. It's work, It's not usually magic and you have to understand a lot about your system to get it right. Peppering in a few cache statements and figuring out the proper querysets isn't that bad. I know that I can't be seen as an impartial observer in this situation since I commit to Tastypie, but I got involved with the project because it did this stuff right. If you've got any suggestions on improvements I'm all ears and my email is in my profile

+1 - couldnt agree more.

Uhm.. sounds like your doing a bunch of N+1 querying, this is generally fixed by overriding get_query_set to use select_related in your manager classes and then you set .objects. to point to the overridden manager class inside of your models.