Best practice when designing an api (with Django)

Hello;

[ This question might be more about general principles for API design than Django, but since Django is my tool of choice - and my context of understanding, I am posting it here.]

I have been maintaining a small Django based website for some time. It is mostly based on conventional views returning HTML, but both to support JavaScript interactivity and to interact with a traditional desktop application I am gradually creating a REST based API. Up until now I have created the REST endpoints manually, but I now I intend to look into the Django Rest Framework (DRF) and try to do things more properly. Now - the question where I would appreciate some guidance boils down to: "How much should I use my own http based API internally?". Assume I have two django models 'Author' and 'Book', each book can have several authors and of course each author can write several books - i.e. this is a many to many relationship:

    class Author(models.Model):

         ....

         books = models.ManyToManyfield( "Book", ...)

    class Book(models.Model):

         ....

It is then natural(?) to configure the urls:

/books/1       - Get information about the book with ID=1

/authors/7    - Get information about the author with ID=7

But let us say that I wanted to create the endpoint:

/books/7/authors

To get the author information for the authors of the book with ID=7. In my view I have used:

    book = Book.objects.get( pk = 7 )

To get the right book, now I want the author details. As I see it I have two approaches to get the author details:

1. I can just use the ordinary Model/ORM methods.
2. I can use my own http api - and "loopback" repeated calls to: /authors/$ID

On the one hand I strongly believe in the "eat your own dogfood" principle, but on the other hand it feels a bit over the top to issue http calls in this situation? Grateful for comments from experienced API desginers.

Joakim

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