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

A web application with just plain Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is quite limiting. We can enhance the look of web pages with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and images, and we can add interaction with JavaScript. We call all these kinds of files "static files." They are developed and then deployed as part of the application. We can compare these to dynamic responses, which are generated in real time when a request is made. All the views you have written generate a dynamic response by rendering a template. Note that we will not consider templates to be static files as they are not sent verbatim to a client; instead, they are rendered first and sent as part of a dynamic response.

During development, the static files are created on the developer's machine, and they must then be moved to the production web server. If you have to move to production in a short timeframe (say, a few hours), then it can be time-consuming to collect all the static assets, move...