A journey through time and space
I’m back out of the Django Rest Framework rabbit hole, with some new knowledge and some progress.
I thought it was going to be a simple matter of learning a couple of libraries and classes, but it turned out to be much more than what I expected. There are so many layers of abstraction here that I needed to take my time to wrap my mind around them.
Link to the project’s source code.
Making new friends on the road
It turns out, in hindsight, that using the DRF for my CRUD application here is definitely overkill. But, hey, this is a learning experience after all; and also I can see the potential of the DRF now for bigger scenarios. Probably, even if I keep building and adding features to this app, it could turn out that the DRF is good solution for scalability.
Anyway, I made this huge deep dive and come out with some new tools and workflows that make me feel much more confident about my back-end skills.
In particular I learned how to:
- Implement a token-based authentication system with DRF.
- Write a script in Django’s management/commands to auto-populate the sqlite db for development (huge time saver).
- Make http test requests via an .http file/script with the help of the Kulala plugin in Neovim (and the relative lsp and linter/formatter).
- I’ve been introduced to django-silk, great tool for checking performance and debugging eventual bottlenecks in the API (again, overkill for my scope right now but great to know).
- Write a serializer, use it into a view (either function or class-based), add it to the urls as an endpoint. All this with DRF.
Adventure awaits
Finally, I managed to implement the first endpoint for my app:
I’m now ready to move on, implement all the needed endpoints, and the logic for filling the bookmark model from a user’s given URL.
Until the next time!