Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Arun Ravindran
Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Arun Ravindran

Overview of this book

Building secure and maintainable web applications requires comprehensive knowledge. The second edition of this book not only sheds light on Django, but also encapsulates years of experience in the form of design patterns and best practices. Rather than sticking to GoF design patterns, the book looks at higher-level patterns. Using the latest version of Django and Python, you’ll learn about Channels and asyncio while building a solid conceptual background. The book compares design choices to help you make everyday decisions faster in a rapidly changing environment. You’ll first learn about various architectural patterns, many of which are used to build Django. You’ll start with building a fun superhero project by gathering the requirements, creating mockups, and setting up the project. Through project-guided examples, you’ll explore the Model, View, templates, workflows, and code reusability techniques. In addition to this, you’ll learn practical Python coding techniques in Django that’ll enable you to tackle problems related to complex topics such as legacy coding, data modeling, and code reusability. You’ll discover API design principles and best practices, and understand the need for asynchronous workflows. During this journey, you’ll study popular Python code testing techniques in Django, various web security threats and their countermeasures, and the monitoring and performance of your application.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Incremental change or a full rewrite?


Often, you will be handed over legacy code by the application owners in the earnest hope that most of it can be used right away or after a couple of minor tweaks. However, reading and understanding a huge and often outdated code base is not an easy job. Unsurprisingly, most programmers prefer working on greenfield development.

In the best case scenario, the legacy code ought to be easily testable, well documented, and flexible to work in modern environments so that you can start making incremental changes in no time. In the worst case, you might recommend discarding the existing code and go for a full rewrite. Alternatively, as it is in most cases, the short-term approach will be to keep making incremental changes, and a parallel long-term effort might be underway for a complete reimplementation.

A general rule of thumb to follow while taking such decisions is that if the cost of rewriting the application and maintaining the application is lower than the...