Django RESTful API - django-piston vs. django-tastypie
We're looking for a general RESTful API solution for our Django project. We would use the API at first for Ajax calls on the web site and later for mobile apps, external apps and things like that.
I found two modules which seem to be widely used. django-piston and django-tastypie
From what I read, piston seems to be older and thus more mature but maybe a bit outdated?! While tastypie is relatively new and nicely documented.
What would be the best thing to go with? django-piston or django-tastypie? Important for us (ordered by priority): Continuous maintenance of the source, documentation, stability, ease of use.
EDIT (2013 Jul 16th):
Now over a year later we have a clear winner. At first we went with tastypie. Which we kinda liked. But after half a year or so we switched to the then upcoming django-rest-framework and never looked back.
What we like most about it:
Nice documentation
Active community
Clean design (build upon django's class based views)
Browsable API for development and debugging
We rely on the API heavily so support (in the future) is one of our main concerns. We met the maintainer - Tom Christie - (on and offline) and he seems very committed to the project. So we feel very comfortable using the django-rest-framework.
Answer
A good resource to compare them is http://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/api/
Django-tastypie sure is the save choice right now.
Personally I'd advocate a look at django-rest-framework if you use django 1.3, because it uses the new class based views. djangopackages.com's comparison page shows it has good participation and activity. And, wow, it sure has a nice browsable interface to the API.