You might want to create an interface for other services to interact with your web application. By building an API, you can allow third parties to consume information and operate with your application programmatically.

There are several ways you can structure your API but following REST principles is encouraged. The REST architecture comes from Representational State Transfer. RESTful APIs are resource-based. Your models represent resources and HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE are used to retrieve, create, update, or delete objects. HTTP response codes are also used in this context. Different HTTP response codes are returned to indicate the result of the HTTP request, for example, 2XX response codes for success, 4XX for errors, and so on.

The most common formats to exchange data in RESTful APIs are JSON and XML. We will build a REST API with JSON serialization for our project. Our API will provide the following functionality:

• Retrieve subjects
• Retrieve available courses
• Retrieve course contents
• Enroll in a course

We can build an API from scratch with Django by creating custom views. However, there are several third-party modules that simplify creating an API for your project, the most popular among them being Django REST framework.