Chapter 1. Developing RESTful APIs with Django

In this chapter, we will start our journey towards RESTful Web APIs with Python and four different Web frameworks. Python is one of the most popular and versatile programming languages. There are thousands of Python packages, which allow you to extend Python capabilities to any kind of domain you can imagine. We can work with many different Web frameworks and packages to easily build simple and complex RESTful Web APIs with Python, and we can also combine these frameworks with other Python packages.

We can leverage our existing knowledge of Python and its packages to code the different pieces of our RESTful Web APIs and their ecosystem. We can use the object-oriented features to create code that is easier to maintain, understand, and reuse. We can use all the packages that we already know to interact with databases, Web services, and different APIs. Python makes it easy for us to create RESTful Web APIs. We don't need to learn another programming language; we can use the one we already know and love.

In this chapter, we will start working with Django and Django REST Framework, and we will create a RESTful Web API that performs CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations on a simple SQLite database. We will:

• Design a RESTful API to interact with a simple SQLite database
• Understand the tasks performed by each HTTP method
• Set up the virtual environment with Django REST framework
• Create the database models
• Manage serialization and deserialization of data
• Write API views
• Make HTTP requests to the API with command-line tools
• Work with GUI tools to compose and send HTTP requests