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)

URL Mapping, Views, and Templates

In the previous chapter, we were introduced to databases, and we learned how to store, retrieve, update, and delete records from a database. We also learned how to create Django models and apply database migrations.

However, these database operations alone cannot display an application’s data to a user. We need a way to display all the stored information in a meaningful way to the user – for example, displaying all the books present in our Bookr application’s database, in a browser, and in a presentable format. This is where Django views, templates, and URL mapping come into play. Views are the part of a Django application that takes in a web request and provides a web response. For example, a web request could be a user trying to view a website by entering the website address, and a web response could be the website’s home page loading in the user’s browser. Views are one of the most important parts of a Django...