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

Middleware

In Chapter 3, URL Mapping, Views, and Templates, we discussed Django's implementation of the request/response process along with its view and rendering functionality. In addition to these, another feature that plays an extremely important role when it comes to Django's core web processing is middleware. Django's middleware refers to a variety of software components that intervene in this request/response process to integrate important functionalities such as security, session management, and authentication.

So, when we write a view in Django, we don't have to explicitly set a series of important security features in the response header. These additions to the response object are automatically made by the SecurityMiddleware instance after the view returns its response. As middleware components wrap the view and perform a series of pre-processes on the request and post-processes on the response, the view is not cluttered with a lot of repetitive code...