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

Introduction

Because Django has been around since 2007, there is a rich ecosystem of third-party libraries that can be plugged into an application to give it extra features. So far, we have learned a lot about Django and used many of its features, including database models, URL routing, templating, forms, and more. We used these Django tools directly to build a web app, but now we will look at how to leverage the work of others to quickly add even more advanced features to our own apps. We have alluded to apps for storing files, (in Chapter 5, Serving Static Files, we mentioned an app, django-storages, that can store our static files in a CDN), but in addition to file storage, we can also use them to plug into third-party authentication systems, integrate with payment gateways, customize how our settings are built, modify images, build forms more easily, debug our site, use different types of databases, and much more. Chances are, if you want to add a certain feature, an app exists...