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

A model for our JSON


As I have mentioned earlier, one of the biggest benefits of using JSON as the definition format for our forms is that it uses just simple text data to encode the definition of complex objects. While some databases such as PostgreSQL have a column type for JSON, others do not. However, because we are dealing with simple text data, we don't need one! We can store our JSON data in a simple TextField and then encode and decode the data to and from a Python dictionary whenever required. In fact, there are many people in the Django community who have already dealt with this problem and open sourced their solutions for us to use.

One such package that I have used in the past is django-jsonfield. You can find it at https://github.com/bradjasper/django-jsonfield, and we will be using it in our project. First, install the required package by typing the following command in your command line. Make sure to have the virtual environment activated first so that it is installed in the...