Book Image

Django Project Blueprints

By : Asad Jibran Ahmed
Book Image

Django Project Blueprints

By: Asad Jibran Ahmed

Overview of this book

Django is a high-level web framework that eases the creation of complex, database-driven websites. It emphasizes on the reusability and pluggability of components, rapid development, and the principle of don't repeat yourself. It lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications quickly. There are several Django tutorials available online, which take as many shortcuts as possible, but leave you wondering how you can adapt them to your own needs. This guide takes the opposite approach by demonstrating how to work around common problems and client requests, without skipping the important details. If you have built a few Django projects and are on the lookout for a guide to get you past the basics and to solve modern development tasks, this is your book. Seven unique projects will take you through the development process from scratch, leaving no stone unturned. In the first two projects, you will learn everything from adding ranking and voting capabilities to your App to building a multiuser blog platform with a unique twist. The third project tackles APIs with Django and walks us through building a Nagios-inspired infrastructure monitoring system. And that is just the start! The other projects deal with customizing the Django admin to create a CMS for your clients, translating your web applications to multiple languages, and using the Elasticsearch search server with Django to create a high performing e-commerce web site. The seventh chapter includes a surprise usage of Django, and we dive deep into the internals of Django to create something exciting! When you're done, you'll have consistent patterns and techniques that you can build on for many projects to come.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Django Project Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Generating dynamic forms


Before we get to the code, we have to decide on a data format to specify the structure of our dynamic forms. JSON is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, data storage and exchange formats on the web right now. You will probably be aware of what JSON, is and how it works and what it looks like. However, if you're not, here's a quick introduction.

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. It uses the same format that JavaScript uses to declare objects. The biggest benefit for us Python guys is that it is almost exactly the same as the dictionary declaration syntax in Python. Let's say that we want to store some details about a user. In JSON, here is what that information would look like:

{
    "name": "Jibran",
    "age": 27,
    "country": "Pakistan"
}

As you can see, we can even copy and paste this into our Python code and it would be a valid dictionary definition, which makes it very easy for us to work with.

JSON has a number of benefits over other data...