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

Improving Performance


Performance is a feature. Studies show how slow sites have an adverse effect on users, and therefore revenue. For instance, tests at Amazon in 2007 revealed that for every 100 ms increase in load time of amazon.com, the sales decreased by 1 percent.

Reassuringly, several high-performance web applications such as Disqus and Instagram have been built on Django. At Disqus, in 2013, they could handle 1.5 million concurrently connected users, 45,000 new connections per second, 165,000 messages per second, with less than 0.2 seconds latency end-to-end.

The key to improving performance is finding where the bottlenecks are. Rather than relying on guesswork, it is always recommended that you measure and profile your application to identify these performance bottlenecks. As Lord Kelvin would say:

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it."

In most web applications, the bottlenecks are likely to be at the browser or the database end rather than within Django. However, to the...