postgres-websockets VS django-rest-framework

At work, we've finally replaced a large part of a custom (mostly-)web backend with PostgREST recently, and that's quite a relief: considerably less code to maintain in that project now, and that was a rather awkward code. Something akin to PostgREST's "Embedding with Top-level Filtering" [1] had to be provided for all the tables, with OpenAPI schema and a typed API (Haskell + Servant); I avoided manually writing it all down, but at the cost of poking framework internals, and maintainability suffered. It was particularly annoying that the code doesn't really do anything useful, except for standing between a database and an HTTP client, and simply mimics the database anyway. Whenever a change had to be introduced, it was introduced into the database, the backend, and the frontend simultaneously, so it wasn't even useful for some kind of compatibility.

Now PostgREST handles all that, and only a few less trivial endpoints are handled by a custom backend (including streaming, which I'm considering replacing with postgrest-websocket [2] at some point).

During the switch to PostgREST, the encountered minor issues were those with inherited tables (had to set a bunch of computed/virtual columns [3] in order to "embed" those), and with a bug on filtering using such relations (turned out it was an already-fixed regression [4], so an update helped). Also a couple of helper stored procedures (to use via /rpc/) for updates in multiple tables at once (many-to-many relationships, to edit entities along with their relationships, using fewer requests) were added (though the old custom backend didn't have that), the security policies were set from the beginning, the frontend was rewritten (which allowed to finally switch without adding more work), so it was only left to cleanup the backend.

Not using views, since as mentioned above, database changes usually correspond to frontend changes, and the API doesn't have to be that stable yet.

Happy with it so far.

[1] https://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html#embedding-with-top-...

[2] https://github.com/diogob/postgres-websockets

[3] https://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html#computed-virtual-co...

[4] https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/issues/2530

- Django Rest Framework has no async support? https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/issues/7260

A URL shortener is a service that transforms long and complex URLs into short, easily memorable ones. This tutorial guides you through creating a URL shortener using Django REST framework and Postgres, deploying it on Koyeb.

Now, I'm converting this app into a Vue-based SPA (still powered by Django). I'm using the Django REST Framework to build the API that the SPA will interact with. (I'll be using token-based auth, via django-rest-knox. ETA: I'll actually be using djangorestframework-simplejwt.)

For the backend, we chose Python, Django Rest Framework. On the frontend, React, Redux, Saga, Sass. Let’s start with the backend, which was managed by Yegor. He writes about the server part of the project himself.

With regard to JSON API aspects of Django, have you used https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ ? I find it to be very satisfactory.

django-rest-framework and the Fetch API, or

Django REST Framework (DRF) Django REST Framework is a famous, powerful, and flexible toolkit for building Web APIs in Django. It provides a set of reusable components and tools to simplify API development, including serialization, authentication, permissions, and view sets.

I wish Django would take async more seriously. This comment gives a pretty good overview of the current situation (some points are more valid than others): https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/discussions/...

The Python ecosystem is strange. Where other dev communities will embrace new ways of doing things faster than most people can keep up — the Python community needs to be pulled kicking and screaming into the light once ever decade or so. Python 2 to 3, ~10 years.

async/await has been in Python since 2015, it feels like it's going to be another 5 years before we see people taking async seriously in the big packages. Same problem we had during the 2/3 transition. No library support, no developer support.

Thanks for helping Steve to complete his REST API, he is now partying🥳. You can get more information on how to use the Django REST framework to best way read the documentation. There are many alternatives to the Django REST framework, you can give them a try if you want,

[Django Rest Framework](https://www.django-rest-framework.org/) has the very nice idea of a [ViewSet](https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/viewsets/#modelviewset) that allows really minimal code to perform all the basic CRUD actions on a model.