[Devel] Options for building standardized APIs for OpenHatch

[Mark Freeman]

Hello team.  I have begun research on adding some standardized APIs to
the OpenHatch code base.  As I can certainly see these growing over
time and multiple people working on them, I want to make sure we
choose the best option going forward.  I've received several
suggestions back from the general python community.  Here is a list of
how I see our options at this point. I've made some general pro/con
statements for each.  I'm extremely interested in everyone's feedback
before we make a decision and begin writing specifications and code.
Personally, my current leaning is toward tastypie or piston, with a
slight edge to tastypie due to the fact it is an active project.
Opinions?

* Option 1: Use Django's built in serialization options.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/serialization/

Pros:
1. Uses built in simplejson module or XMLSerializer
2. How it is implemented is pretty straight-forward

Cons:
1. You would need multiple views/paths to be able to support multiple formats
2. Home spun solution.  Others probably already did it better.


* Option 2: Django-tastypie

 https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie and
http://django-tastypie.readthedocs.org/

Pros:
1. Automatically supports several data formats based on argument passed to view
2. Supports authentication if required
3. Supports throttling of calls to a view, if needed
4. Built to support good REST design
5. Actively being developed and growing user base

Cons:
1. Several external dependencies
2. Requires understand how the app works rather than just basic views


* Option 3: Django-piston

https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home

Pros:
1. Automatically supports several data formats based on argument passed to view
2. Supports authentication if required
3. Supports throttling of calls to a view, if needed
4. Built to support good REST design
5. Quite a few people using it

Cons:
1. Has not been actively developed for more than a year.
2. Multiple forks of the project which seem to address 1 issue or 2.
3. While it does have the larger community behind it, this seems to be
dying out with many people moving to  tasty-pie
4. Feedback I got from most people was that piston works great, but
you have to generally tweak piston itself to get things working
correctly.

Mark