DRF

Django REST Framework (DRF) is a free and open-source toolkit for building Web APIs with Django. It provides a high-level framework for designing, developing, and testing RESTful interfaces, emphasizing simplicity and reusable components within the Django ecosystem.

Core components include serializers for translating between Django model instances and primitive data types, views and viewsets that implement API endpoints, and routers that automatically generate URL configurations from ViewSets. These building blocks help developers create robust APIs with reduced boilerplate.

DRF offers authentication and permissions systems, including token, session, and basic authentication, plus a rich permission framework to control access to API resources. It handles content negotiation and supports multiple renderers (commonly JSON) and parsers (JSON, form, multipart), enabling clients to exchange data in different formats.

Other features include pagination, filtering, search, versioning, throttling, and an exception handling framework. The framework integrates tightly with Django's ORM and admin, supports a browsable API for exploration during development, and provides generic views, mixins, and ModelViewSet to reduce boilerplate.

DRF is maintained by the Django REST Framework community and others; it is released under the BSD license and hosted on GitHub. It has a large ecosystem of third-party packages and is widely used in production projects for building scalable APIs.