Book Image

Learning Django Web Development

By : Sanjeev Jaiswal, Ratan Kumar
Book Image

Learning Django Web Development

By: Sanjeev Jaiswal, Ratan Kumar

Overview of this book

<p>Django, written in Python, is a web application framework designed to build complex web applications quickly without any hassle. It loosely follows the MVC pattern and adheres to the Don't Repeat Yourself principle, which makes a database-driven application efficient and highly scalable, and is by far the most popular and mature Python web framework.</p> <p>This book is a manual that will help you build a simple yet effective Django web application. It starts by introducing Django, setting it up, and shows you how to code simple programs. You will then learn to build your first Twitter-like app. Later on, you will be introduced to Hashtags, AJAX to enhance the user interface, and tweets. You will then move on to create an administration interface, learn database connectivity, and use third-party libraries. Then you will learn to debug and deploy Django projects, and also get a glimpse of Django with AngularJS and Elasticsearch. By the end of the book, you will be able to leverage the Django framework to develop a fully functional web application with minimal effort.</p>

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Small book image
Learning Django Web Development
Sanjeev Jaiswal | Ratan Kumar
Jun, 2015 | 336 pages
No titles found
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Learning Django Web Development
Learning Django Web Development
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction to Django
Introduction to Django
Why web development in the first place?
What has changed in web development
The MVC pattern in web development
Why Django?
Supported databases
What you will learn using this book
Summary
2
Getting Started
Getting Started
Installing the required software
Creating your first project
Summary
3
Code Style in Django
Code Style in Django
Django coding style
Using IDE for faster development
Setting up your project with the Sublime text editor
Setting up the PyCharm IDE
The Django project structure
Best practices – using version control
Setting up the database
Launching the development server
Faster web development
Summary
4
Building an Application Like Twitter
Building an Application Like Twitter
A word about Django terminology
Setting up a basic template application
Installing Django
Setting up the basic Twitter Bootstrap for the application
URLs and views – creating the main page
Introduction to class-based views
Django settings for the mytweets project
Putting it all together – generating user pages
Models – designing an initial database schema
Summary
5
Introducing Hashtags
Introducing Hashtags
The hashtag data model
Designing the tweet post form
Creating a tag page
Summary
6
Enhancing the User Interface with AJAX
Enhancing the User Interface with AJAX
AJAX and its advantages
Using an AJAX framework in Django
Using the open source jQuery framework
Implementing the searching of tweets
Implementing the live searching of tweets
Editing a tweet in place without loading a separate page
Autocompletion of hashtags while submitting a tweet
Summary
7
Following and Commenting
Following and Commenting
Letting users follow another user
Displaying the most followed user
Summary
8
Creating an Administration Interface
Creating an Administration Interface
Customizing the administration interface
Customizing listing pages
Overriding administration templates
Users, groups, and permissions
Organizing content into pages – pagination
Summary
9
Extending and Deploying
Extending and Deploying
Sending invitation e-mails to friends
Internationalization (i18n) – offering the site in multiple languages
Caching – improving the performance of your site during high traffic
Unit testing – automating the process of testing your application
Deploying Django
Summary
10
Extending Django
Extending Django
Custom template tags and filters
Class-based generic views
Contributed sub-frameworks
Flatpages
The message system
The subscription system
User scores
Summary
11
Database Connectivity
Database Connectivity
SQL versus NoSQL
Setting up a database system
The single-page application project – URL shortener
Summary
12
Using Third-party Packages
Using Third-party Packages
Diving into the world of open source
Using SocialAuth in Django projects
Building REST APIs in Django
Summary
13
The Art of Debugging
The Art of Debugging
Logging
Debugging
IPDB – interactive way of busting bugs
Summary
14
Deploying Django Projects
Deploying Django Projects
The production web server
The production database
Turning off the debug mode
Changing configuration variables
Setting error pages
Django on cloud
Summary
15
What's Next?
What's Next?
AngularJS meets Django
Django search with Elasticsearch
Summary
Index
Index

The Django project structure

The Django project structure has been changed in the 1.6 release version. Django (django-admin.py) also has a startapp command to create an application, so it is high time to tell you the difference between an application and a project in Django.

A project is a complete website or application, whereas an application is a small, self-contained Django application. An application is based on the principle that it should do one thing and do it right.

To ease out the pain of building a Django project right from scratch, Django gives you an advantage by auto-generating the basic project structure files from which any project can be taken forward for its development and feature addition.

Thus, to conclude, we can say that a project is a collection of applications, and an application can be written as a separate entity and can be easily exported to other applications for reusability.

To create your first Django project, open a terminal (or Command Prompt for Windows users...

Previous Section
End of Section 6
Next Section