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

Django is a great tool for building the backend of an application. You have seen how easy it is to set up the database, route URLs, and render templates. Without using JavaScript, though, when those pages are rendered to the browser, they are static and do not provide any form of interaction. By using JavaScript, your pages can be transformed into applications that are fully interactive in the browser.

This chapter will be a brief introduction to JavaScript frameworks and how to use them with Django. While it won't be a deep dive into how to build an entire JavaScript application from scratch (that would be a book in itself), we will give enough of an introduction so that you can add interactive components to your own Django application. In this chapter, we will primarily be working with the React framework. Even if you do not have any JavaScript experience, we will introduce enough about it so that, by the end of this chapter, you will be comfortable writing your...