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 function-based views

As the name implies, function-based views are implemented as Python functions. To understand how they work, consider the following snippet, which shows a simple view function named home_page:

from django.http import HttpResponse
def home_page(request):
    message = "<html><h1>Welcome to my Website</h1></html>"
    return HttpResponse(message)

The view function defined here, named home_page, takes a request object as an argument and returns an HttpResponse object with a Welcome to my Website message. The advantage of using function-based views is that, since they are implemented as simple Python functions, they are easier to learn and also easily readable for other programmers. The major disadvantage of function-based views is that the code cannot be reused and made as concisely as class-based views for generic use cases. The next section is a brief introduction to class...