Book Image

Django 4 By Example - Fourth Edition

By : Antonio Melé
4.6 (5)
Book Image

Django 4 By Example - Fourth Edition

4.6 (5)
By: Antonio Melé

Overview of this book

Django 4 By Example is the 4th edition of the best-selling franchise that helps you build web apps. This book will walk you through the creation of real-world applications, solving common problems, and implementing best practices using a step-by-step approach. You'll cover a wide range of web app development topics as you build four different apps: A blog application: Create data models, views, and URLs and implement an admin site for your blog. Create sitemaps and RSS feeds and implement a full-text search engine with PostgreSQL. A social website: Implement authentication with Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Create user profiles, image thumbnails, a bookmarklet, and an activity stream. Implement a user follower system and add infinite scroll pagination to your website. An e-commerce application: Build a product catalog, a shopping cart, and asynchronous tasks with Celery and RabbitMQ. Process payments with Stripe and manage payment notifications via webhooks. Build a product recommendation engine with Redis. Create PDF invoices and export orders to CSV. An e-learning platform: Create a content management system to manage polymorphic content. Cache content with Memcached and Redis. Build and consume a RESTful API. Implement a real-time chat using WebSockets with ASGI. Create a production environment using NGINX, uWSGI and Daphne with Docker Compose. This is a practical book that will have you creating web apps quickly.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
Other Books You May Enjoy
19
Index

The Django architecture

Figure 1.1 shows how Django processes requests and how the request/response cycle is managed with the different main Django components: URLs, views, models, and templates:

Figure 1.1: The Django architecture

This is how Django handles HTTP requests and generates responses:

  1. A web browser requests a page by its URL and the web server passes the HTTP request to Django.
  2. Django runs through its configured URL patterns and stops at the first one that matches the requested URL.
  3. Django executes the view that corresponds to the matched URL pattern.
  4. The view potentially uses data models to retrieve information from the database.
  5. Data models provide the data definition and behaviors. They are used to query the database.
  6. The view renders a template (usually HTML) to display the data and returns it with an HTTP response.

We will get back to the Django request/response cycle at the end of this chapter in the The request/response cycle section.

Django also includes hooks in the request/response process, which are called middleware. Middleware has been intentionally left out of this diagram for the sake of simplicity. You will use middleware in different examples of this book, and you will learn how to create custom middleware in Chapter 17, Going Live.