Book Image

Web Development with Django

By : Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest
Book Image

Web Development with Django

By: Ben Shaw, Saurabh Badhwar, Andrew Bird, Bharath Chandra K S, Chris Guest

Overview of this book

Do you want to develop reliable and secure applications which stand out from the crowd, rather than spending hours on boilerplate code? Then the Django framework is where you should begin. Often referred to as a 'batteries included' web development framework, Django comes with all the core features needed to build a standalone application. Web Development with Django takes this philosophy and equips you with the knowledge and confidence to build real-world applications using Python. Starting with the essential concepts of Django, you'll cover its major features by building a website called Bookr – a repository for book reviews. This end-to-end case study is split into a series of bitesize projects that are presented as exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. As you progress, you'll learn various practical skills, including how to serve static files to add CSS, JavaScript, and images to your application, how to implement forms to accept user input, and how to manage sessions to ensure a reliable user experience. Throughout this book, you'll cover key daily tasks that are part of the development cycle of a real-world web application. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Django.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface

Model View Template

A common design pattern in application design is Model View Controller (MVC), where the model of the application (its data) is displayed in one or more views and a controller marshals interaction between the model and view. Django follows a somewhat similar paradigm called Model View Template (MVT).

Like MVC, MVT also uses models for storing data. However, with MVT, a view will query a model and then render it with a template. Usually, with MVC languages, all three components need to be developed with the same language. With MVT, the template can be in a different language. In the case of Django, the models and views are written in Python and the Template in HTML. This means that a Python developer could work on the models and views, while a specialist HTML developer works on the HTML. We'll first explain models, views, and templates in more detail, and then look at some example scenarios where they are used.

Models

Django models define the data for...