Django API Domains

Style guides for the API age

Version	Author(s)	Date
1.2.1	Paul Hallett paulandrewhallett@gmail.com	25-09-2019
1.2	Paul Hallett paulandrewhallett@gmail.com	10-06-2019
1.1	Paul Hallett paulandrewhallett@gmail.com	09-04-2019
1.0	Paul Hallett paulandrewhallett@gmail.com	01-02-2019

Introduction

This styleguide combines domain-driven design principles and Django's apps pattern to provide a pragmatic guide for developing scalable API services with the Django web framework.

This styleguide tries to tackle two big problems:

1. Design philosophies and design patterns work in "ideal" situations, and most real life problems do not represent this ideal world. Therefore we need to develop a flexible pattern that can adjust to support different situations.
2. The original design and documentation of Django is geared heavily towards server-side-rendered-view applications, yet most modern Django applications are built to serve APIs for a separate frontend application. Therefore, Django's patterns are outdated for today's trends.

In order to overcome these problems, this styleguide tries to achieve the following five goals:

1. Treat Django's apps more like software domains.
2. Extend Django's apps implementation to support strong bounded context patterns between domains.
3. Enable separation of domains to happen when it makes sense for increased development velocity, not just for business value.
4. Design a styleguide that reduces the effort involved in extracting the code for large domains into separate application servers.
5. Make sure the styleguide compliments API-based applications.

Read the styleguide

The styleguide is now published as a readable documentation site. You can view it at https://phalt.github.io/django-api-domains/ or view the docs folder directly.