Django's REST (Framework) Problem

Piston, Tastypie, a custom framework, Django Rest Framework, and now what? Ninja? Shinobi? Each one has stalled out in its own way and all have failed to keep up with the rest of Django. (e.g. async REST API views should NOT require another, fourth-party, library.)

I’ve been beating this drum for a decade now. Django needs “django.contrib.rest”. REST API frameworks have always been too important to leave to third-party maintainers. They need to be maintained in the core.

I just want something that feels like Django and doesn’t change. Unfortunately I think Django has been debating something as fundamental as content negotiation, the first step towards supporting this is core, for over a decade now.

If it’s a money issue I’d be thrilled to donate $5k tomorrow. I also have a JWT auth package that I could contribute. Unfortunately there appears to be little to no appetite for any of it.

I've considered donating to encode, DRF's parent organization, most of their effort is directed towards Starlette, an async framework that competes with Django. It even powers FastAPI. Encode has put enormous effort into making everything but Django Rest Framework support async.

I don't get mad about much in open source but this has been an obvious risk for over a decade. The steering council should should have spotted the iceberg and started turning the ship long ago. Removing the bug tracker and burying the announcement that the project is looking for a new maintainer in an unrelated PR comment is a too much: https://github.com/encode/django-rest-framework/pull/9186#is...

> The issues backlog had become overwhelmed to the point that it presented as a smokey all-boys club. Unless we've got a welcoming & diverse environment to work in, there's no point in doing the work. It'd be damaging rather than constructive to allow that to continue. The project is open to new maintainership & genuine parties are welcome to reach out. [Two Hearts Emoji — https://emojipedia.org/two-hearts]

At the very least I should have found out about this from an announcement, not by rummaging around after checking in on the status of a long-standing bug and getting a 404.