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 class-based views

As the name implies, class-based views are implemented as Python classes. Using the principles of class inheritance, these classes are implemented as subclasses of Django’s generic view classes. Unlike function-based views, where all the view logic is expressed explicitly in a function, Django’s generic view classes come with various pre-built properties and methods that can provide shortcuts to writing clean, reusable views. This property comes in handy quite often during web development; for example, developers often need to render an HTML page without needing any data inserted from the database, or any customization specific to the user. In this case, it is possible to simply inherit from Django’s TemplateView, and specify the path of the HTML file. The following is an example of a class-based view that can display the same message as in the function-based view example:

from django.views.generic import TemplateView
class HomePage...