I am building a application that services users via a web front end, which I have chosen to use Django for. I also have to choose a framework/libraries to provide management of and abstracted access to a bunch of embedded systems that provide information the web user gets to see in one form or another.
I like the idea of sticking with a restful approach to access the backend application which provides the hardware generated resources. Does it make sense to use Django for the front end and CherryPy for the backend? Or should I just use Django for both and ignore the stuff I don't need in django for the backend.
I guess another way to ask, is what do I gain by using CherryPy as the backend that out ways having to know two sets of libraries/frameworks.
I don't see any real benefit, only added complexity in the long run. If you are using Django's ORM, you'll want to build the REST interface around that anyways. For building REST interfaces with Django I like using django-tastypie which makes it easy to build RESTful APIs supporting authentication/authorization, validation, various types of serialization, throttling, caching, etc. I also rather like django-piston, which is also quite popular.