First off, out of the box, Django lets you construct API responses with a little work. All you need to do is something like this: # Copied from https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/class-based-views/#more-than-just-html from django import http from django.utils import simplejson as json class JSONResponseMixin(object): def render_to_response(self, context): "Returns a JSON response contain