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

Function-Based Views

As the name implies, function-based views are implemented as Python functions. To understand how they work, consider the following snippet, which shows a simple view function named home_page:

from django.http import HttpResponse
def home_page(request):
    message = "<html><h1>Welcome to my Website</h1></html>"
    return HttpResponse(message)

The view function defined here, named home_page, takes a request object as an argument and returns an HttpResponse object having the Welcome to my Website message. The advantage of using function-based views is that, since they are implemented as simple Python functions, they are easier to learn and also easily readable for other programmers. The major disadvantage of function-based views is that the code cannot be re-used and made as concise as class-based views for generic use cases.