Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. 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 takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features 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 that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn 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. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

REST APIs

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. Most modern web APIs can be classified as REST APIs. REST APIs are simply a type of API that focuses on communicating and synchronizing the state of objects between the database server and frontend client.

For example, imagine that you are updating your details on a website for which you are signed into your account. When you go to the account details page, the web server tells your browser about the various details attached to your account. When you change the values on that page, the browser sends back the updated details to the web server and tells it to update these details on the database. If the action is successful, the website will show you a confirmation message.

This is a very simple example of what is known as decoupled architecture between frontend and backend systems. Decoupling allows greater flexibility and makes it easier to update or change components in your architecture. So, let's say you want...