Django REST Model was written in a Test Driven Development style. For example usages please refer to xml_models_test.py For XPath processing, the py-dom-xpath library is included, but this is a fairly slow pure python library. While it works perfectly well, Django REST Model was written originally to work with LXML, which is a much faster library, and provides better namespace support. If Django REST Model appears slow, try switching to LXML and hopefully you'll experience significant speed improvements.