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

A view from the top


In Django, a view is defined as a callable that accepts a request and returns a response. It is usually a function or a class with a special class method such as as_view().

In both cases, we create a normal Python function that takes an HTTPRequest as the first argument and returns an HTTPResponse. A URLConf can also pass additional arguments to this function. These arguments can be captured from parts of the URL or set to default values.

Here is what a simple view looks like:

# In views.py 
from django.http import HttpResponse 
 
def hello_fn(request, name="World"): 
    return HttpResponse("Hello {}!".format(name)) 

Our two-line view function is quite simple to understand. We are currently not doing anything with the request argument. We can examine a request to better understand the context in which the view was called, for example, by looking at the GET/POST parameters, URI path, or HTTP headers such as REMOTE_ADDR.

Its corresponding mappings in URLConf using the traditional...