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

Class-Based Views

Django provides different ways in which developers can write views for their applications. One way is to map a Python function to act as a view function to create FBVs. Another way of creating views is to use Python object instances (which are based on top of Python classes). These are known as CBVs. An important question that arises is, what is the need for a CBV when we can already create views using the FBV approach?

The idea here, when creating FBVs, is that at times, we may be replicating the same logic again and again, for example, the processing of certain fields, or logic for handling certain request types. Although it is completely possible to create logically separate functions that handle a particular piece of logic, the task becomes difficult to manage as the complexity of the application increases.

This is where CBVs come in handy, where they abstract away implementation of the common repetitive code that we need to write to handle certain tasks...