Book Image

Building SPAs with Django and HTML Over the Wire

By : Andros Fenollosa
5 (1)
Book Image

Building SPAs with Django and HTML Over the Wire

5 (1)
By: Andros Fenollosa

Overview of this book

The HTML over WebSockets approach simplifies single-page application (SPA) development and lets you bypass learning a JavaScript rendering framework such as React, Vue, or Angular, moving the logic to Python. This web application development book provides you with all the Django tools you need to simplify your developments with real-time results. You’ll learn state-of-the-art WebSocket techniques to realize real-time applications with minimal reliance on JavaScript. This book will also show you how to create a project with Docker from the ground up, test it, and deploy it on a server. You’ll learn how to create a project, add Docker, and discover development libraries, Django channels, and bidirectional communication, and from then, on you’ll create real projects of all kinds using HTML over WebSockets as a chat app or a blog with real-time comments. In addition, you’ll modernize your development techniques by moving from using an SSR model to creating web pages using WebSockets over HTML. With Django, you’ll be able to create SPAs with professional real-time projects where the logic is in Python. By the end of this Django book, you’ll be able to build real-time applications, as well as gaining a solid understanding of WebSockets with Django.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Python
4
Part 2: WebSockets in Django
8
Part 3: HTML over WebSockets
11
Part 4: Simplifying the frontend with Stimulus

Managing events with actions

Actions are a structure used by Stimulus to link events to controller functions. They are declared in the DOM by means of a data-action dataset with the following structure:

<div data-controller="aliasController">
<button
  data-action=
    "event->aliasController#functionOfTheController"
>Click me!</button>
</div>

It will only work if it is inside a controller with the same alias; you cannot place an action in DOMs outside the tree.

Following the example, we modify our button:

<input
  type="button"
  value="Transform"
  data-action="click->transformer#lowercaseToUppercase"
>

Let’s analyze what we have done with data-action, since it contains its own format that we must follow:

  1. The event is click. It could be any other event, such as a submit event if we were in a HTML <form...