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

Sessions

It is worth looking at some theory to understand why sessions are a common solution in web applications for managing user content. The HTTP protocol defines the interactions between a client and a server. It is said to be a "stateless" protocol as no stateful information is retained by the server between requests. This protocol design worked well for delivering hypertextual information in the early days of the World Wide Web, but it did not suit the needs of secured web applications delivering customized information to specific users.

We are now acquainted with seeing websites adapt to our personal viewing habits. Shopping sites recommend similar products to the ones that we have recently viewed and tell us about products that are popular in our region. These features all required a stateful approach to website development. One of the most common ways to implement a stateful web experience is through sessions. A session refers to a user's current interaction...