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

Exposing data and APIs


One of the biggest elements of the web applications developed in the last decade has been the adoption of so-called Web 2.0 features. These come in a variety of flavors, but one thing that has been persistent amongst them all is a data-centric view of the world. Modern web applications work with data, usually stored in a database, in ways that are more modular and flexible than ever before. As a result, many web-based companies are choosing to share parts of their data with the world in hopes of generating "buzz", or so that interested developers might create a clever "mash-up" (a combination of third-party application software with data exposed via an API or other source).

These mash-ups take a variety of forms. Some simply allow external data to be integrated or imported into a desktop or web-based application. For example, loading Amazon's vast product catalog into a niche website on movie reviews. Others actually deploy software written in web-based languages into...