Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S
4.7 (3)
Book Image

Web Development with Django - Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Chris Guest, Bharath Chandra K S

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications that stand out from the crowd without spending hours on boilerplate code? You’ve made the right choice trusting the Django framework, and this book will tell you why. Often referred to as a “batteries included” web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django will take you through all the essential concepts and help you explore its power to build real-world applications using Python. Throughout the book, you’ll get the grips with the major features of Django by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you advance, you'll acquire various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. You’ll cover everyday tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this Django book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively develop and deploy your own projects.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)

Introducing Django views

You now have everything set up to start writing your own Django views and configure the URLs that will map to them. As we saw earlier in this chapter, a view is simply a function that takes an HttpRequest instance (built by Django) and (optionally) some parameters from the URL. It will then perform some operations, such as fetching data from a database. Finally, it returns HttpResponse.

To use our Bookr app as an example, we might have a view that receives a request for a certain book. It queries the database for this book, and then returns a response containing an HTML page, showing information about the book. Another view could receive a request to list all the books, and then return a response with another HTML page containing this list. Views can also create or modify data; another view could receive a request to create a new book, and it would then add the book to the database and return a response with HTML that displays the new book’s information...