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

Django Views

To recall, a view in Django is a piece of Python code that allows a request to be taken in, performs an action based on the request, and then returns a response to the user, and hence forms an important part of our Django applications.

Inside Django, we have the option of building our views by following two different methodologies, one of which we have already seen in the preceding examples and is known as function-based views, while the other one, which we will be covering soon, is known as class-based views:

  • Function-Based Views (FBVs): FBVs inside Django are nothing more than generic Python functions that are supposed to take an HTTPRequest type object as their first positional parameter and return an HTTPResponse type object, which corresponds to the action the view wants to perform once the request is processed by it. In the preceding exercise, index() and greeting_view() were examples of FBVs.
  • Class-Based Views (CBVs): CBVs are views that closely adhere...