Reports / February 2019

REST framework

We’ve issued a 3.9.2 release, with large number of minor improvements, updates and bug fixes.

• Routers: invalidate _urls cache on register().
• Deferred schema renderer creation to avoid requiring pyyaml.
• Added ‘request_forms’ block to base.html.
• Fixed SchemaView to reset renderer on exception.
• Update Django Guardian dependency.
• Ensured support for Django 2.2.
• Made templates compatible with session-based CSRF.
• Adjusted field validators to accept non-list iterables.
• Added SearchFilter.get_search_fields() hook.
• Fix DeprecationWarning when accessing collections.abc classes via collections.
• Allowed Q objects in limit_choices_to introspection.
• Added lazy evaluation to composed permissions.
• Add negation ~ operator to permissions composition.
• Avoided calling distinct on annotated fields in SearchFilter.
• Introduced RemovedInDRF…Warning classes to simplify deprecations.

TypeSystem

I’ve released a new stand-alone package for data validation and form rendering: TypeSystem.

• Handles both data validation and form rendering equally.
• Supports positional error marking within JSON or YAML documents.
• Supports templated form generation, or pre-packaged form themes.

The typesystem package is important for a couple of different reasons.

• We’d like to properly pull the API documentation generation out of being a REST framework built-in, and into a standalone package. apistar has been a start on this, but a stand-alone package that can nicely render form inputs based on information in an API schema would help improve the API documentation generation substantially.
• REST framework’s serializers being able to support data validation or form rendering has always been a big feature - it’s important that we bring that into a standalone package, to make it more widely available.
• The databases and typesystem packages together are the two foundational pieces we’d need in order to implement a fully async ORM.

The ASGI ecosystem

Uvicorn, Starlette, and Databases have all been maturing nicely, with various improvements in each.

There has been significant work towards a 3.0 version of the ASGI specification, which uses a single-callable interface, rather than the previous double-callable structure:

• async def asgi(scope, receive, send)

This will result in simpler ASGI implementations and neater tracebacks.

Servers such as Daphne, Uvicorn, and Hypercorn will remain compatible with both versions of the specification for the foreseeable future.

Finances

I’ve not had a chance to fully review our finances recently, but we’re running a bit in the red right now. This isn’t an imminent issue, as there’s currently enough in the bank to operate at the current level for a while, but it’ll need closer review over the next couple of months.

There’s a really strong business case in signing up for a sponsorship if your company has any significant investment in:

• Making your business highly visible to the widest possible audience of developers and potential job applicants.
• Ensuring Django REST framework can remain well supported for the for foreseeable future.
• Ensuring the Python web ecosystem remains a highly competitive choice over the medium and long term.

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As ever thank you so much to all our sponsors, contributors, and users.

— Tom Christie, 7th March, 2019.