Is django-piston mature enough?

Question

I'm developing an advertising site and want to use web services for the requests. I mean, a publisher site will put a JavaScript snippet and it will pull a banner through a REST GET.

Is the django-piston framework mature enough to implement this functionality?

Answer 1

I am currently using it and it's good enough for my needs, which are fairly simple (mostly just an easy way to set up a read-only API for model data). I do have a couple of criticisms:

1. It doesn't seem that jespern, the code's creator, is doing much in response to issues posted to bitbucket. Possibly an unfair criticism, and activity in the django-piston Google Group. Still it's frustrating to post an issue and encounter zero response whatsoever.

2. It appears there are some inconsistencies or errors in the coding. For example, this issue that I posted. (I may pursue it further in the group).

Answer 2

I've been looking into finding the "best" Django REST package and came across this table, which is useful:

http://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/api/

At this point (mid-2011) Django-Tastypie is the clear winner for number of authors, updated codebase, documentation, and overall activity.

EDIT, Jan.2012: I think the two leading contenders are now Django-Tastypie, and also, Django-REST-framework. The latter has a really useful feature of web-browsable APIs, which I've yet to see in other packages.

Answer 3

I can't answer "is it mature enough." We are still evaluating our options ourselves.

However, you might want to check out these:

• http://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie -- perhaps an up and coming competitor to piston.
• http://ericholscher.com/blog/2009/nov/11/large-problems-django-mostly-solved-rest-api/

Answer 4

Django is certainly mature enough. It's powering more than a dozen high-profile sites in production. Piston on the other hand, I wouldn't know, except for bitbucket.org. I don't know of any other "high-profile" sites that use it. It doesn't sound like you need a complex framework on top of Django just to handle REST. You could easily implement a RESTful service on top of Django without using any other specific library.