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

Learning more about testing


Django's default test runner has improved a lot over the years. However, test runners such as py.test and nose are still superior in terms of functionality. They make your tests easier to write and run. Even better, they are compatible with your existing test cases.

You might also be interested in knowing what percentage of your code is covered by tests. This is called code coverage, and coverage.py is a very popular tool for finding this out.

Most projects today tend to use a lot of JavaScript functionality. Writing tests for them usually requires a browser-like environment for execution. Selenium is a great browser automation tool for executing such tests.

While a detailed treatment of testing in Django is outside the scope of this book, I would strongly recommend that you learn more about it.

If nothing else, the two main takeaways I wanted to convey through this section are first, write tests, and second, once you are confident at writing them, practice TDD.