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)

Serving Static Files

A web application with just plain HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is quite limiting. We can enhance the look of web pages with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and images, and add interaction with JavaScript. We call all these kinds of files “static files.” They are developed and then deployed as part of the application. We can compare this to dynamic responses, which are generated in real time when a request is made. All the views you have written generate a dynamic response by rendering a template. Note that we will not consider templates to be static files as they are not sent verbatim to a client; instead, they are rendered first and sent as part of a dynamic response.

During development, the static files are created on the developer’s machine, and then they must be moved to the production web server. If you must move to production in a short timeframe (say, a few hours) then it can be time-consuming to collect all the static assets, move...