Django's class based views are a welcome departure from the old-style views.

— Reinout van Rees

Views

REST framework provides a simple APIView class, built on Django's django.generics.views.View. The APIView class ensures five main things:

1. Any requests inside the view will become Request instances.
2. Request instances will have their renderers and authentication attributes automatically set.
3. Response instances will have their parsers and serializer attributes automatically set.
4. APIException exceptions will be caught and return appropriate responses.
5. Any permissions provided will be checked prior to passing the request to a handler method.

Additionally there are a some minor extras, such as providing a default options handler, setting some common headers on the response prior to return, and providing the useful initial() and final() hooks.

APIView

Method handlers

Describe that APIView handles regular .get(), .post(), .put(), .delete() etc...

.initial(request, args, *kwargs)

.final(request, response, args, *kwargs)

.parsers

.renderers

.serializer

.authentication

.permissions

.headers