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

Chapter 6. Enhancing the User Interface with AJAX

The coming of AJAX was an important landmark in the history of Web 2.0. AJAX is a group of technologies that enables developers to build interactive, feature-rich web applications. Most of these technologies were available many years before AJAX too. However, the advent of AJAX represents the transition of the web from static pages that need to be refreshed whenever data was exchanged to dynamic, responsive, and interactive user interfaces.

Since our project is a Web 2.0 application, it should be heavily focused on the user's experience. The success of our application depends on getting users to post and share content on it. Therefore, the user interface of our application is one of our major concerns. This chapter will improve the interface of our application by introducing AJAX features, making it more user-friendly and interactive.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

  • AJAX and the benefits of using it in web applications

  • How...