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

Using an AJAX framework in Django


In this section we will choose and install an AJAX framework in our application. This step isn't entirely necessary when using AJAX in Django, but can greatly simplify working with AJAX. There are many advantages in using an AJAX framework:

  • JavaScript implementations vary from browser to browser. Some browsers provide more complete and feature-rich implementations, whereas others contain implementations that are incomplete or don't adhere to standards. Without an AJAX framework, the developer must keep track of browser support for the JavaScript features that they are using and work around the limitations that are present in some browser implementations of JavaScript. On the other hand, when using an AJAX framework, the framework takes care of this for us. It abstracts access to the JavaScript implementation and deals with the differences and quirks of JavaScript across browsers. This way, we can concentrate on developing features instead of worrying about...