Last month Eldarion's Chief Architect, Brian Rosner, spoke at DjangoCon US 2016.

Brian presented a talk on Building JSON APIs with Django and Pinax:

The requirements of web apps we built today have changed drastically. The web browser (and many other frontends) are becoming more prominent in our development. How do we design a backend that can cope with this drastic shift in thinking and tooling?

JavaScript is a language we simply cannot ignore. It isn't just JavaScript, too. Objective-C, Swift and Java are all languages we are finding we need to work with to meet client expectations about a web app.

The role Django (and Python) play in this new world is becoming a bit more limited. There are plenty of great efforts to get Python running everywhere, but this talk isn't about any of that. This talk is about building the API all of these frontends need to communicate with to drive persistent and business logic.

pinax-api was originally built to serve the needs of a particular client at Eldarion, but later pulled out as its own app. It provides a simple and modern interface to building an API with Django. At its core, pinax-api leverages the JSON:API spec that was built out of Ember.

In his talk Brian discussed the following:

  • What is JSON:API?
  • JSON:API in pinax-api
  • API primitives provided by pinax-api
  • How pinax-api leverages Django to its fullest
  • Automatic documentation generation using API Blueprint
  • Why not Django REST Framework?