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

Jinja2


Jinja2 is very similar to DTL in syntax. But it has a slightly different philosophy in certain places. For instance, in DTL the method call is implied as in the following example:

{% for post in user.public_posts %} 
    ... 
{% endfor %} 

But in Jinja2, we invoke the public_posts method similar to a Python function call:

{% for post in user.public_posts() %} 
    ... 
{% endfor %} 

This means that in Jinja2 you can call functions with arguments, unlike DTL. Refer to the Jinja2 documentation for more such subtle differences.

Jinja2 is usually chosen for the following reasons:

  • Familiarity: If your template designers are already comfortable using Jinja2
  • Whitespace control: Jinja2 has finer control over whitespace after the tags get rendered
  • Customizability: Most aspects of Jinja2, from string defining markup to extensions, can be easily configured
  • Performance: Some benchmarks show Jinja2 is faster than Django
  • Autoescape: By default, Jinja2 disables XML/HTML autoescaping for performance

In most...