Book Image

Django 1.2 E-commerce

By : Jesse Legg
Book Image

Django 1.2 E-commerce

By: Jesse Legg

Overview of this book

<p>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 provides an excellent basis to build e-commerce websites because it can be deployed fast and it responds quickly to changes due to its ability to handle content problems. Django with its proven strengths is all you need to build powerful e-commerce applications with a competitive edge. <br /><br />This book explores how the Django web framework and its related technologies can power the next leap forward for e-commerce and business on the Web. It shows you how to build real-world applications using this rapid and powerful development tool.<br /><br />The book will enable you to build a high quality e-commerce site quickly and start making money. It starts with the ambitious task of using Django to build a functional e-commerce store in less than 30 minutes, and then proceeds to enhance this design through the rest of the book. The book covers the basics of an e-commerce platform like product catalogs, shopping carts, and payment processing. By the end of the book, you will be able to enhance the application by adding a fully-functional search engine, generating PDF-based reports, adding interactivity to the user-interface, selling digital goods with micropayments, and managing deployment and maintenance tasks.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Django 1.2 e-commerce
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Shopping carts and Django sessions


Django makes it very easy to build a shopping cart for our web-based e-commerce stores and applications. In fact, Django does an excellent job of solving a more general problem: persisting temporary data between browser requests in a simple way. This is what Django's session framework gives us.

Any pickleable Python object can be stored using the session framework. The session object is attached to incoming requests and is accessible from any of our views. Requests from users that are not logged in, or haven't even created accounts, get session objects too. Django manages all of this by associating a cookie in the user's browser with a session ID. When the browser issues a request, the SessionMiddleware attaches the appropriate session object to the request so that it is available in our views.

Sessions, and the cookies that manage them, have an expiration date. This expiration is not necessarily tied to the expiration of browser cookies and can be controlled...