I recently wrote an article, due to be published in this month’s Information Technologies and Libraries (ITAL) journal, about a project I started a few years ago called Zoomify Image. Basically, Zoomifyer is a Flash based image viewer that allows you to quickly view high resolution images over the Web. And I mean really high resolution images–files Gigabytes in size. It can do this because of a second piece of software that pre-processes images on the server, splitting them into tiles at various scales that the Zoomifyer viewer can then asynchronously request as needed to render the image in the browser. Zoomify Image is written in Python and makes Zoomifyer available across platforms.

I posted an announcement to the django-users list about the django-restful-model-views contribution to get some feedback on the approach. The main responder, Malcolm Tredinnick, gave me a lot to think about and along with more research into how Ruby on Rails (RoR) implements REST, I have new ideas about how to improve the contribution.

This time around, I will try to take the logical next step with my exploration of REST and Django, and begin creating a Django contribution to implement the ideas I have been working on and to do so in a way that fits with Django’s philosophy.

This is the third post in a series exploring how to create a basic tagging application, and how to do so in the Django framework so that I may better understand Django as well as other technologies and development approaches that are at least somewhat new to me. This time, I want to revisit REST, and hopefully come up with something more usable from the last post.

If you’ve read my blog in the past, and you probably haven’t, you’ll know that I have been trying earnestly to understand how to effectively apply REST, both in Web applications and Web Services. I also believe that you can’t claim to know something, and judge it fairly, until you have used it in a significant project. That is what I intend to begin in this post.