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

AJAX and its advantages


AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, consists of the following technologies:

  • HTML and CSS for structuring and styling information.

  • JavaScript for accessing and manipulating information dynamically.

  • XMLHttpRequest—an object provided by modern browsers for exchanging data with the server without reloading the current web page.

  • A format for transferring data between the client and the server. XML is sometimes used, but it could be HTML, plain text, or a JavaScript-based format known as JSON.

AJAX technologies allow the code on the client-side to exchange data with the server behind the scenes, without having to reload the entire page each time the user makes a request. Using AJAX, web developers are able to increase the interactivity and usability of web pages.

AJAX offers the following advantages when implemented in the right places:

  • Better user experience: With AJAX the user can do a lot without refreshing the page, which brings web applications closer...