This talk will discuss lessons our team learned while developing backend services for Safari Books Online using four of the most popular approaches in Django:

• Plain views
• The Piston framework
• The Tastypie framework
• Django Rest Framework

Aspects of these approaches that the talk will focus on include:

• Maintainability of the resulting code
• Performance characteristics
• Library communities (in the case of frameworks)
• Perceived elegance

We've found that while each of these approaches has benefits and tradeoffs, one stands above the others, and we are now building new services and porting older services to it.