Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Arun Ravindran
Book Image

Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Arun Ravindran

Overview of this book

Building secure and maintainable web applications requires comprehensive knowledge. The second edition of this book not only sheds light on Django, but also encapsulates years of experience in the form of design patterns and best practices. Rather than sticking to GoF design patterns, the book looks at higher-level patterns. Using the latest version of Django and Python, you’ll learn about Channels and asyncio while building a solid conceptual background. The book compares design choices to help you make everyday decisions faster in a rapidly changing environment. You’ll first learn about various architectural patterns, many of which are used to build Django. You’ll start with building a fun superhero project by gathering the requirements, creating mockups, and setting up the project. Through project-guided examples, you’ll explore the Model, View, templates, workflows, and code reusability techniques. In addition to this, you’ll learn practical Python coding techniques in Django that’ll enable you to tackle problems related to complex topics such as legacy coding, data modeling, and code reusability. You’ll discover API design principles and best practices, and understand the need for asynchronous workflows. During this journey, you’ll study popular Python code testing techniques in Django, various web security threats and their countermeasures, and the monitoring and performance of your application.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Jumping around the code


Reading code sometimes feels like browsing the web without the hyperlinks. When you encounter a function or variable defined elsewhere, you will need to jump to the file that contains that definition. Some IDEs can do this automatically for you as long as you tell it which files to track as part of the project.

If you use Emacs or Vim instead, you can create a TAGS file to quickly navigate between files. Go to the project root and run a tool called Exuberant Ctags, as follows:

find . -iname "*.py" -print | etags -

This creates a file called TAGS that contains the location information, where every syntactic unit, such as classes and functions, is defined. In Emacs, you can find the definition of the tag, where your cursor (or point as it is called in Emacs) is at using the M-. command.

While using a tag file is extremely fast for large code bases, it is quite basic and is not aware of a virtual environment (where most definitions might be located). An excellent alternative...