API

Recently, Caktus has been using Tailscale to manage VPN connections between Android tablets and a central server. We wanted to report on the devices connected to the network using the Tailscale API. While we could use tools like Celery to fetch data from the API and load it into a database—given its widespread use in the Django ecosystem—we also wanted to explore other options.

Anytime we host resources for a client within the Caktus Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, we set up a sub-account and put the resources there. Some of the advantages of doing this compared to putting a client's resources in our main account are:

During the last year we gave our popular technical blog an official name: Developer Access. We published 32 posts on the blog, including technical how-to’s, conference information, web development best practices and detailed guides. Among all those posts, 19 rose to the top of the popularity list (based on total pageviews):

Within the past year, my development team at Caktus worked on a project that required a front-end framework to build a fast, easy-to-use product for a client. After a discussion of frameworks such as React, Vue, and Angular, and their approaches, our team settled on using Vue.js, along with a Django back-end with Django REST Framework (DRF). Initially, we chose Vue because we were more familiar with it, rather than its current competitor React, but as we worked on the product, we ended up having a number of team discussions about how to organize our code well and avoid extra code debt. This blog outlines some of the development patterns we chose as we worked through a number of issues, such as simplifying a multitude of almost identical Vuex mutations, finding a consistent way of holding temporary state, and working with nested objects on the front-end and back-end.

As part of our work to make sharp web apps at Caktus, we frequently create API endpoints that allow other software to interact with a server. Oftentimes this means using a frontend app (React, Vue, or Angular), though it could also mean connecting some other piece of software to interact with a server. A lot of our API endpoints, across projects, end up functioning in similar ways, so we have become efficient at writing them, and this blog post gives an example of how to do so.

It's been awhile since we last discussed bulk inserts on the Caktus blog. The idea is simple: if you have an application that needs to insert a lot of data into a Django model — for example a background task that processes a CSV file (or some other text file) — it pays to "chunk" those updates to the database so that multiple records are created through a single database operation. This reduces the total number of round-trips to the database, something my colleague Dan Poirier discussed in more detail in the post linked above.

What Is Django Rest Framework?

Django Rest Framework (DRF) is a library which works with standard Django models to build a flexible and powerful API for your project.

How do your users interact with your web app? Do you have users who are requesting new features? Are there more good feature requests than you have developer hours to build? Often, a small addition to your app can open the door to let users build features they want (within limits) without using more of your own developers’ time, and you can still keep control over how data can be accessed or changed. That small addition is called an application programming interface, or API. APIs are used across the web, but if you aren’t a developer, you may not have heard of them. They can be easily built on top of Django projects, though, and can provide great value to your own developers as well as to your users.