Django REST Framework(DRF)

Django REST Framework (DRF) is the de facto standard for building HTTP APIs on top of Django. It layers serializers, generic viewsets, routers, authentication, permissions, pagination, filtering, and throttling on top of Django's ORM and request/response cycle — every common API need has a battle-tested DRF primitive.

A typical DRF flow: define a serializer that maps a Django model to JSON (and validates incoming JSON back into model instances), wire a ModelViewSet that exposes list/retrieve/create/update/destroy endpoints, and register it with a DRF Router that auto-generates URL patterns. The browsable API ships out of the box, so you can hit your endpoints in a browser and inspect responses during development.

Compared to FastAPI or Flask-based APIs, DRF trades raw async performance for tight Django integration: you get the ORM, admin, migrations, signals, and middleware for free. If your app is already in Django, DRF is almost always the right choice; if you're building a standalone async API service, FastAPI is usually a better fit.