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

Why asynchronous?


Like most WSGI-based web frameworks, Django is synchronous. When a client requests a web page, the request reaches Django through a view and passes through various lines of code until the rendered web page is returned. As this communication waits or blocks until the process executes all this code, it is termed as synchronous.

New Django developers do not worry about creating asynchronous tasks, but I've noticed that their code eventually accumulates slow blocking tasks, such as image processing or even complex database queries, which leads to unbearably slow page loads. Ideally, they must be moved out of the request-response cycle. Page loading time is critical to user experience, and it must be optimized to avoid any delays.

Another fundamental problem of this synchronous model is the handling of events that are not triggered by web requests. Even if a website does not have any visitors, it must attend to various maintenance activities. They can be scheduled at a particular...