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Responses
Unlike basic HttpResponse objects, TemplateResponse objects retain the details of the context that was provided by the view to compute the response. The final output of the response is not computed until it is needed, later in the response process.
REST framework supports HTTP content negotiation by providing a Response class which allows you to return content that can be rendered into multiple content types, depending on the client request.
The Response class subclasses Django's SimpleTemplateResponse. Response objects are initialised with data, which should consist of native python primatives. REST framework then uses standard HTTP content negotiation to determine how it should render the final response content.
There's no requirement for you to use the Response class, you can also return regular HttpResponse objects from your views if you want, but it provides a nicer interface for returning Web API responses.
Unless you want to heavily customize REST framework for some reason, you should always use an APIView class or @api_view function for views that return Response objects. Doing so ensures that the view can perform content negotiation and select the appropriate renderer for the response, before it is returned from the view.
Response(data, status=None, headers=None)
Unlike regular HttpResponse objects, you do not instantiate Response objects with rendered content. Instead you pass in unrendered data, which may consist of any python primatives.
The renderers used by the Response class cannot natively handle complex datatypes such as Django model instances, so you need to serialize the data into primative datatypes before creating the Response object.
You can use REST framework's Serializer classes to perform this data serialization, or use your own custom serialization.
.data
The unrendered content of a Request object can be accessed using the .data attribute.
.content
To access the rendered content of a Response object, you must first call .render(). You'll typically only need to do this in cases such as unit testing responses - when you return a Response from a view Django's response cycle will handle calling .render() for you.
.renderer
When you return a Response instance, the APIView class or @api_view decorator will select the appropriate renderer, and set the .renderer attribute on the Response, before returning it from the view.