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

Implementing live searching of bookmarks


We will start introducing AJAX into our application by implementing live searching. The idea behind this feature is simple: When the user types a few keywords into a text field and clicks search, JavaScript works behind the scenes to fetch search results and presents them on the same page. The search page does not reload, thus saving bandwidth and providing a better and more responsive user experience.

Before we start implementing this, we need to keep in mind an important rule while working with AJAX: Write your application so that it works without AJAX, and then introduce AJAX to it. If you do so, you ensure that everyone will be able to use your application, including users who don't have JavaScript enabled and those who use browsers without AJAX support.

Implementing basic searching

So before we work with AJAX, let's write a simple view that searches bookmarks by title. First of all, we need to create a search form. So, open bookmarks/forms.py and...