Do I need to use REST framework on Django?

Question

Do I need to use the REST framework on Django, if I were to use a front-end framework such as React and database engine such as MongoDB or PostgreSQL? I also don't fully understand what a REST framework is.

Answer 1

No. You don't have to, django is able to process requests, and manage database connections by itself. You could build a complete API without using django rest framework at all, that could do anything that you could do with django rest framework.

But. DRF adds a lot of stuff that would make developing such a back-end alot faster. It has lots of features that make building common use cases quick, such as serializing/deserialzing requests, CRUD operations etc. Django can also do some of this, but DRF is specifically designed for building out an API.

REST refers to a RESTful API. SO DRF is a framework that is useful for building restful APIs. What a restful API is, is a fairly big question in and of itself. It stands for REpresentational State Transfer, but could best be described better than I can do here. Maybe checkout this answer here: What is REST? Slightly confused