Introduction to Django Rest Framework:

Django Rest Framework (DRF) is a third-party package that adds additional functionality to Django for building APIs.

At its core, it is made up of an array of tools and utilities for performing serialization and deserialization, authentication of users, and building views, URLs, and routers for carrying out API requests related to these actions

Building RESTful APIs using DRF:

To build RESTful APIs with DRF, you typically follow these steps:

Define your API endpoints using Django Rest Framework's views and routers.

Create serializers to convert complex data types (like model instances) into native Python data types (like dictionaries).

Implement views that handle incoming HTTP requests and return appropriate HTTP responses.

Configure URL routing to map API endpoints to the corresponding views.

Serializers, views, and routers in DRF:

Serializers: DRF serializers provide the tool to convert the most difficult data like Django models into a more simple native Python types and they represent these types as JSON or XML responses.

They furthermore take care of the deserialization process which is subtype specific and forked from the base type.

                                
from rest_framework import serializers
from .models import MyModel

class MyModelSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = MyModel
        fields = ['id', 'name', 'description']

                                
                            

Views: Responses in DRF will deal with the overall application logic of processing incoming HTTP requests and returning corresponding HTTP responses.

The DRF framework offers generic views as the building blocks for the most common actions of any app in the category.

                                
from rest_framework import generics
from .models import MyModel
from .serializers import MyModelSerializer

class MyModelListView(generics.ListCreateAPIView):
    queryset = MyModel.objects.all()
    serializer_class = MyModelSerializer

                                
                            

Routers: The use of Routers in DRF is more conventient as you can wire up view classes automatically to their respective URL patterns.

These define the URL patterns for a given view set as well as convert https to http.

                                
from rest_framework import routers
from .views import MyModelViewSet

router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'mymodels', MyModelViewSet)