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

Installing the required software


Our development environment consists of Python, Django, and a database system. There are many different database systems available. In this book, we will be using a system known as SQLite. In the following section, we will see how to install the necessary software packages.

Installing Python

Django is written in Python, so the first step in setting up our development environment is to install Python. Python is available for a variety of operating systems, and installing it is not very different from installing any other software package. The procedure depends on your operating system.

You will need a recent version of Python. Django requires Python 2.3 or higher. The latest version of Python, at the time of writing, is 2.5.

We will now look at the installation process for each operating system.

Installing Python on Windows

Python has a standard installer for Windows users. You will need to go to http://www.python.org/download/ and download the latest version of...