Rendering Django models to JSON

I recently discussed a simple template tag that allows rendering “raw” jquery templates inside a Django template, even though the syntax overlaps. A commenter asked for a Pypi package. It was such a simple template tag that I didn’t want to maintain a separate package for it, but it turns out, this tag fits in very well with the next step in the project. The short story is that the tag is now available on Pypi.

The tag is distributed with a project I called Djason (named for Django, JSON, and former Arch Linux Developer, Jason Chu, and because djson was already taken). Djason’s primary purpose is to serialize Django models to a json client format that is friendly to client libraries, especially to jquery-tmpl. It is essentially just a fork of Django Full Serializers with a patch applied, and some minor edits to simplify the output json. I install it as a Django serializer in settings.py using:

SERIALIZATION_MODULES = {
    'djason': 'djason.json'
}

And in my code:

from django.core.serializers import serialize

    content = serialize("djason", project,
            relations=["location_set", "company", "project_type"])
    return HttpResponse(content)

I’ll probably be adding some additional code to this package to fit in with my still cloudy ideas about the proper separation between client and server code. I’ll also likely be rewriting portions of the forked project to appease my personal sense of style.