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 the previous chapter, we learned about templates and class-based views. These concepts greatly help expand the range of functionalities we can provide to the user on the frontend (that is, in their web browser). However, that is not sufficient to build a modern web application. Web apps typically have the frontend built with an entirely separate library, such as ReactJS or AngularJS. These libraries provide powerful tools for building dynamic user interfaces; however, they do not communicate directly with our backend Django code or database. The frontend code simply runs in the web browser and does not have direct access to any data on our backend server. Therefore, we need to create a way for these applications to "talk" to our backend code. One of the best ways to do this in Django is by using REST APIs.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs are used to facilitate interaction between different pieces of software, and they communicate...