title: How to build a json REST API in django (without Django REST framework)
body: <h3>Preface</h3>
  
  <p>I have a django project. I've wired it up so it serves a bunch of views for a bunch of models. Now I want to add an endpoint which just dumps a good fraction of the database out as json. </p>
  
  <p>The way I would assume you do this is add a URL to a view class / method which returns a HTTPResponseObject full of json. Unfortunately, after quite a bit of googling, all I can find are references to <a href="http://www.django-rest-framework.org/" rel="noreferrer">Django REST framework</a>. This is the sort of thing you would think Django would provide internally not as part of an external plugin library. But searching the django docs doesn't yield an immediate answer -- I don't think there are any docs about how to build an endpoint which just serves a bunch of json. </p>
  
  <h3>Questions:</h3>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Do I really need "Django REST framework" to serve json in django?</li>
  <li>Did I overlook docs in Django for serving json?</li>
  <li>What is the canonical way to serve json in a django project?</li>
  </ul>