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

Chapter 10. Dealing with Legacy Code

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Reading a Django code base
  • Discovering relevant documentation
  • Incremental changes versus full rewrites
  • Writing tests before changing code
  • Legacy database integration

It sounds exciting when you are asked to join a project. Powerful new tools and cutting-edge technologies might await you. However, quite often, you are asked to work with an existing, possibly ancient, code base.

To be fair, Django has not been around for that long. However, projects written for older versions of Django are sufficiently different to cause concern. Sometimes, having the entire source code and documentation might not be enough.

If you are asked to recreate the environment, you might need to fumble with the OS configuration, database settings, and running services locally or on the network. There are so many pieces to this puzzle that you might wonder how and where to start.

Understanding the Django version used in the code is a...