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

What Is a Form?

When working with an interactive web app, we not only want to provide data to users but also accept data from them to either customize the responses we are generating or let them submit data to the site. When browsing the web, you will most definitely have used forms. Whether you're logging in to your internet banking account, surfing the web with a browser, posting a message on social media, or writing an email in an online email client, in all these cases, you are entering data in a form. A form is made up of inputs that define key-value pairs of data to submit to the server. For example, when logging in to a website, the data being sent would have the keys username and password, with the values of your username and your password, respectively. We will go into the different types of inputs in more detail in the Types of Inputs section. Each input in the form has a name, and this is how its data is identified on the server-side (in a Django view). There can be...