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

Models: designing an initial database schema


Almost every Web 2.0 application requires a database to store and manage its data. The database engine is a fundamental component of web development today. Web applications offer the user a UI to enter and manage his or her data, and use a database engine behind the scenes to manage this data.

Note

In Django, you can think of view as the component responsible for collecting and displaying data, and the model as the component responsible for storing and managing it.

We will choose the database engine that configured our database settings in the previous chapter. In this section, we will make use of the database to store and manage user accounts and bookmarks.

If you are used to dealing with the database directly through SQL queries, then you may find Django's approach to database access a bit different. Loosely speaking, Django abstracts access to database tables through Python classes. To store, manipulate, and retrieve objects from the database...