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

Serializers

By now, we are well versed in the way Django works with data in our application. Broadly, the columns of a database table are defined in a class in models.py, and when we access a row of the table, we are working with an instance of that class. Ideally, we often just want to pass this object to our frontend application. For example, if we wanted to build a website that displayed a list of books in our Bookr app, we would want to call the title property of each book instance to know what string to display to the user. However, our frontend application knows nothing about Python and needs to retrieve this data through an HTTP request, which just returns a string in a specific format.

This means that any information translated between Django and the frontend (via our API) must be done by representing the information in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. JSON objects look similar to a Python dictionary, except there are some extra rules that constrict the exact syntax...