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 serializers

By now, we are well versed in the way Django works with data in our application. Broadly, the columns of a database table are defined in a class in models.py, and when we access a row of the table, we are working with an instance of that class. Ideally, we often just want to pass this object to our frontend application. For example, if we wanted to build a website that displayed a list of books in our Bookr app, we would want to call the title property of each book instance to know what string to display to the user. However, our frontend application knows nothing about Python and needs to retrieve this data through an HTTP request, which just returns a string in a specific format.

This means that any translation of information between Django and the frontend (via our API) must be done by representing the information in JSON format. JSON objects look similar to a Python dictionary, except there are some extra rules that constrict the exact syntax. In our...