This is a bullet from the django-rest-framework page I linked above: "Modular architecture - MixIn classes can be used without requiring the Resource or ModelResource classes."
Here's one of the examples from django-rest-framework that is not tied to models: http://django-rest-framework.readthedocs.org/en/latest/examp...
And also, from the Tastypie docs: http://django-tastypie.readthedocs.org/en/latest/resources.h...