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)

Understanding REST APIs

Most modern web APIs can be classified as REST APIs. REST APIs are simply a type of API that focuses on communicating and synchronizing the state of objects between the database server and frontend client.

For example, imagine that you are updating your details on a website for which you are signed in to your account. When you go to the account details page, the web server tells your browser about the various details attached to your account. When you change the values on that page, the browser sends back the updated details to the web server and tells it to update these details on the database. If the action is successful, the website will show you a confirmation message.

This is a very simple example of what is known as decoupled architecture between frontend and backend systems. Decoupling allows greater flexibility and makes it easier to update or change components in your architecture. So, let’s say you want to create a new frontend website...