Introduction to DRF

Most of the plain Django API from the previous lesson was not about articles. Returning data took one JsonResponse, but reading JSON from clients, checking every field, deciding who may write, and choosing a status code for each failure took the rest of the code. Django provides no ready tools for those jobs in an API, so every new view would repeat them by hand.

Django REST framework (DRF) is a third-party package that adds those tools to Django. It is the most widely used way to build REST APIs with Django, and the rest of this chapter uses it.