A little decorator that allows you to return a dict in your views instead of render_to_response or HttpResponse or whatever. It respects the callback argument for proper JSONP action if you so choose.

json_response.py

from django.http import HttpResponse
from decorator import decorator
import simplejson as json

@decorator
def json_response(f, *args, **kwargs):
    try:
        status_code = 200
        response = {
            'status': True,
            'data': f(*args, **kwargs)
        }
    except Exception, e:
        status_code = 400
        response = {
            'status': False,
            'message': '%s: %s' % (e.__class__.__name__, str(e))
        }

    body = json.dumps(response, indent=4)
    if 'callback' in args[0].GET:
        body = '%s(%s)' % (args[0].GET['callback'], body)

    return HttpResponse(body, status=status_code)

Originally by joestump at http://forrst.com/posts/Simple_JSON_response_decorator_for_Django-0Ns