Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Overview of this book

Django is a high-level Python web framework that was developed by a fast-moving online-news operation to meet the stringent twin challenges of newsroom deadlines and the needs of web developers. It is designed to promote rapid development and clean, pragmatic design and lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications rapidly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle, making it easier to build high-performance web applications faster, with less code. This book will show you how to assemble Django's features and take advantage of its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully-featured web site. It will walk you through the creation of an example web application, with lots of code examples. Specially revised for version 1.0 of Django, the book starts by introducing the main design concepts in Django. Next, it leads you through the process of installing Django on your system. After that, you will start right away on building your social bookmarking application using Django. Various Django 1.0 components and sub-frameworks will be explained during this process, and you will learn about them by example. In each chapter, you will build one or more of the features that are essential in Web 2.0 applications, like user management, tags, and AJAX. You will also learn about good software development practices, such as keeping your application secure, and automating testing with unit tests. By the end of the book, you will have built a fully functional real-life Web 2.0 application, and learned how to deploy it to a production server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.0 Web Site Development
Credits
About the author
About the reviewer
Preface

Improving performance with caching


Pages of web applications are dynamically generated. Code is executed to process user input and generate output every time a page is requested. There are a lot of overheads involved in generating dynamic pages, especially when compared to serving static HTML files. The code may connect to a database, perform computationally expensive calculations, process files, and so on. At the same time, being able to generate pages with code is exactly what makes a web site dynamic and interactive. Wouldn't it be great if we could get the best of both worlds? This is what caching does, and it's a feature that is implemented in most sites with medium to high traffic.

When a page is requested, caching works by storing the generated HTML of the page and reusing it later when the same page is requested again. This cuts a lot of overheads by avoiding the need to generate the same page over and over. Of course, cached pages are not stored forever. When a page is cached, an...