How to Set Up a REST Service or a Web Application in Django

Introduction to Django and REST

Django is a very versatile framework, primarily used for developing web applications, but it is also widely used in creating mobile app backends and REST APIs, among other things. Here we will take a quick look at how to make these things possible using Django.

As you all probably know, REST stands for “Representational State Transfer.” Basically, what happens is that a user (or some software agent on one end) provides some input (or performs some activity) and the result of those inputs (or activities) are sent to the server side using a protocol that allows a request to be sent to the server (in most cases a HTTP protocol is used, but it doesn't need to be HTTP, as long as it can support a request/response scheme). The server, on receiving the request, makes appropriate changes to the state of the system (hence we call it “State Transfer”).