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 12. Security

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Various web attacks and countermeasures
  • Where Django can and cannot help
  • Security checks for Django applications

Several prominent industry reports suggest that websites and web applications remain one of the primary targets of cyber attacks. Yet, about 86 percent of all websites, tested by a leading security firm in 2013, had at least one serious vulnerability.

Releasing your application to the wild is fraught with several dangers ranging from the leaking of confidential information to denial-of-service attacks. Mainstream media headlines security flaws focusing on exploits, such as Heartbleed, Cloudbleed, Superfish, and POODLE, that have an adverse impact on critical website applications, such as email and banking. Indeed, one often wonders if WWW now means the World Wide Web or the Wild Wild West.

One of the biggest selling points of Django is its strong focus on security. In this chapter, we will cover the top techniques...