Because I don't trust the results of google and how old they are I am going to ask the HN Community. I want to get a proof of concept out for an app. I am more of a UI developer and have dabbled in django/tastypie however it will take me a good couple days to get that setup in AWS. I have a data model that I could easily implement in a database (pretty good with SQL) but not tied to relational DB. My Question: What is the absolute easiest and fastest way to setup a restful web service based on a datamodel. (And I'd like to use json for the format) GO!
Go with Flask Restless [1]. You're gonna be up and running in minutes.<p>[1] <a href="https://flask-restless.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quickstart.html" rel="nofollow">https://flask-restless.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quickstart....</a>
If you don't mind server-side JavaScript, I've fallen head over heels for SailsJS[0]. It's a Node framework built on top of Express that has MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite integration. The hook is that it automatically generates a REST API for all of your models. So you "sails new project", "cd project", "sails generate model thing", edit models/thing and add the attributes, and you're done. Backbone routes are created automagically. (You can also define more complex API functionality in the controller as usual, and it also has built-in socket.io support.)<p>[0] <a href="http://sailsjs.org" rel="nofollow">http://sailsjs.org</a>
If you feel like you have a headstart in Django, I'd go that route.<p>Else, I might be partial to do it in something like Rails that would allow me to write almost 0 lines of code, instead just spend time connecting various gems, libraries, etc and make a push to Heroku and get a proof of concept up.<p>While Proof-Of-Concept is running (free on Heroku) I would probably spend time rewriting it in Python or if you become partial to Ruby, just sticking with it...
...or you might want to forgo the custom back-end completely and use one of the "nobackend" solutions: <a href="http://nobackend.org/solutions.html" rel="nofollow">http://nobackend.org/solutions.html</a><p>For example deployd is open source AFAIR; others (like Firebase, Parse) are hosted solutions. But overall they all give you instant CRUD over your data. In your case, their turn-key multi-user capabilities are a bonus.