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

Introduction

In Chapter 3, URL Mapping, Views, and Templates, we learned how to build views and create templates in Django. Then, we learned how to use those views to render the templates we built. In this chapter, we will build upon our knowledge of developing views by using class-based views, which allow us to write views that can group logical methods into a single entity. This skill comes in handy when developing a view that maps to multiple HTTP request methods for the same Application Programming Interface (API) endpoint. With method-based views, we may end up using a lot of if-else conditions to successfully handle the different types of HTTP request methods. In contrast, class-based views allow us to define separate methods for every HTTP request method we want to handle. Then, based on the type of request received, Django takes care of calling the correct method in the class-based view.

Beyond the ability to build views based on different development techniques, Django...