Calvin Hendryx-Parker (CTO of sixfeetup, and founder of the Indianapolis-based IndyPy user group) hosted a webinar for us where he showed how to add a REST API to a Django application.
In the webinar, he shows how to use djangorestframework. This library makes adding a REST API to a Django application very easy. The framework supports serving JSON and HTML endpoints by default, but can be extended to support other formats like XML and CSV.
Calvin discusses how to use viewsets and routers to make the code concise and effective. Furthermore he shows how to add authentication to the API.
To follow along with Calvin, you can clone the repository from GitHub. To do this right in PyCharm go to VCS | Checkout from Version Control | GitHub, and then use the following repository URL: https://github.com/sixfeetup/ElevenNote.git
PyCharm Professional Edition has several features which make Django development a lot easier: tight integration with the framework itself for the manage.py console, and tailored run configurations. Other Professional Edition features that make web development easier are for example the REST client, and the built-in database tooling (from DataGrip, the JetBrains database IDE).
Please keep in mind that Calvin uses several features that are available only in PyCharm Professional Edition, if you’re using PyCharm Community Edition you can try these features 30 days for free by downloading the latest version of PyCharm Professional Edition.
If you have any questions or comments about the webinar, feel free to leave them in the comments below, or you can reach us on Twitter. Calvin is on Twitter as well, his Twitter handle is @calvinhp.
-PyCharm Team
The Drive to Develop