Halp! (REST framework 2.0 release date fixed)

[Tom Christie]

So,

  The work on REST framework 2.0 has been going incredibly well,  I've been working on this like crazy, but I've also been fortunate enough to work in a forward thinking job that's given me plenty of time on the clock to help make this happen.  With just a bit more effort the project will be in a releasable state, so I've decided to set a fixed cutoff for the release of REST framework 2.0.  The release will be made this month, in whatever shape it's in.

  If you haven't yet taken a look at how the documentation is shaping up, now is a good time to do so.

http://tomchristie.github.com/django-rest-framework/

  I'm really excited about this, I've designed the hell out of this thing and I think it's going to go really, really far.

  The current TODO list involves a few bugs to iron out around the browseable API, a few minor API tweaks, some extra serializer fields needs, a bit more work on the documentation, and revising the tutorial slightly.  Nothing major, but still a fair bit of legwork, and of course I'd like this to be as well tested as possible by the time it goes live - first impressions matter.

  If you'd like to help get this over the finishing line I would *really* appreciate beta testers from this point forward.  There will be some ongoing changes over the coming week, but after that I'd assume it'll all be stable, and I'm willing to invest as much support time as I can spare for anyone who wants to start using 2.0 now.  If you do want to start using 2.0 please let me know so I can help wherever possible, and keep you informed of any API changes that occur over the next few days.

  I'm also aware that I've been awful at growing the core team - at the moment only Myself and Marko Tibold have write access to the repo and PyPI repository - that needs to change.  I think I may have mentioned the same thing a while back and failed to act on it, but if you have been involved in the project and would like to be on the core team from 2.0 onwards please do let me know privately and we can thrash out how the project management should look from here onwards.

Cheers all,

  Tom

[Jani Tiainen]

I would be really happy to test and start early migrations but I couldn't find suitable 1.x to 2.0 migration guide which in such a major rewriting is quite essential. I think it would be sufficient to use old sandbox apps as an example how they should look in 2.0. Of course I might have missed such a docs...

--
Jani Tiainen

- Well planned is half done, and a half done has been sufficient before...

[Jens Alm]

This is great news!

While I won't be able to test DRF 2 this week, for personal reasons. I'm very much looking forward to using and contributing in the coming weeks. We have a pretty sizable app built on DRF 1 so we won't be able to migrate for a while, but I'll look into using it for some new stuff we're doing.

/Jens

[Marc Aymerich]

These are excellent news!! Thanks you very much for your great effort!
I'm going to implement a REST API for a new project during the next
month and I'll start straight with rest_framework 2 :)

Also I've been looking at the tutorial and in the Resources section
you talk about Routers, but on the source code I couldn't find any
reference of them.
Are Routers planned for the next release? It looks like a great
feature if your datamodel is very similar to the API, like mine.

br
--
Marc

[Tom Christie]

>  I couldn't find suitable 1.x to 2.0 migration guide

Right, I've started on that now, but it's unfinished.

http://tomchristie.github.com/django-rest-framework/topics/migration

In the meantime the first bits of the tutorial will give you a really good start.

> Are Routers planned for the next release?

Right now that entirely depends on timescales.  I would love for those to make it in, but I won't let it block the release from happening early.  Even without the resources/routers the framework looks great - they're just a helpful shortcut.  If someone would like to help get that feature over the line I think it'd be a great piece of work to pick off - the documentation pretty much shows how it needs to look, and I can provide any additional support that's needed.

[Mjumbe Poe]

Migration's been an my mind a lot lately as well, since I've got a significant project I've been working on porting over. If I get a chance, I'll contribute to those docs this week.

[Tom Christie]

That'd be great, thanks!

[Ian Strachan]

I've been using version 2.0 for a couple of weeks now as Tom has been developing and, after a few expected teething issues, it seems to be working really well now.  Although the framework does a lot of things for you, the main improvement I've found over other approaches has been the ease in which I've been able to hook in some of the more custom features I've needed.  Since it's pretty much just Django, controlling things like URLs has been a breeze and despite the work in progress documentation I've had to spend surprisingly little time looking at the source code!

I think Tom's definitely got the right approach here; even simple things like being able to override a function called post to do custom work during rather than having to intimately know what happens during a post make a huge difference to your productivity.