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

Class-Based Views

As the name implies, class-based views are implemented as Python classes. Using the principles of class inheritance, these classes are implemented as subclasses of Django's generic view classes. Unlike function-based views, where all the view logic is expressed explicitly in a function, Django's generic view classes come with various pre-built properties and methods that can provide shortcuts to writing clean, reusable views. This property comes in handy quite often during web development; for example, developers often need to render an HTML page without needing any data inserted from the database, or any customization specific to the user. In this case, it is possible to simply inherit from Django's TemplateView, and specify the path of the HTML file. The following is an example of a class-based view that can display the same message as in the function-based view example:

from django.views.generic import TemplateView
class HomePage(TemplateView...