Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Overview of this book

Django is a high-level Python web framework that was developed by a fast-moving online-news operation to meet the stringent twin challenges of newsroom deadlines and the needs of web developers. It is designed to promote rapid development and clean, pragmatic design and lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications rapidly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle, making it easier to build high-performance web applications faster, with less code. This book will show you how to assemble Django's features and take advantage of its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully-featured web site. It will walk you through the creation of an example web application, with lots of code examples. Specially revised for version 1.0 of Django, the book starts by introducing the main design concepts in Django. Next, it leads you through the process of installing Django on your system. After that, you will start right away on building your social bookmarking application using Django. Various Django 1.0 components and sub-frameworks will be explained during this process, and you will learn about them by example. In each chapter, you will build one or more of the features that are essential in Web 2.0 applications, like user management, tags, and AJAX. You will also learn about good software development practices, such as keeping your application secure, and automating testing with unit tests. By the end of the book, you will have built a fully functional real-life Web 2.0 application, and learned how to deploy it to a production server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.0 Web Site Development
Credits
About the author
About the reviewer
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we learned about the three main components of Django: the view, model, and template. We wrote data models to store the data of our application, and then created views and templates to display this data. We also learned how to map URLs to views, and how to use the interactive console to experiment with our Django project.

The following is a summary of the Django features covered in this chapter:

  • To create an application within a project, run the following command:

    $ python manage.py startapp <app-name>
    
  • After writing a data model, the following command should be run to create the corresponding tables in the database:

    $ python manage.py syncdb
    
  • To view the SQL queries generated by Django, issue the following command:

    $ python manage.py sql <app-name>
    
  • Data models provide a variety of methods to interact with the database engine:

    • The save method saves an object into the database

    • The objects.get method retrieves an object by a unique field

    • The objects.all method...