Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Book Image

Django 1.0 Website Development

Overview of this book

Django is a high-level Python web framework that was developed by a fast-moving online-news operation to meet the stringent twin challenges of newsroom deadlines and the needs of web developers. It is designed to promote rapid development and clean, pragmatic design and lets you build high-performing, elegant web applications rapidly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle, making it easier to build high-performance web applications faster, with less code. This book will show you how to assemble Django's features and take advantage of its power to design, develop, and deploy a fully-featured web site. It will walk you through the creation of an example web application, with lots of code examples. Specially revised for version 1.0 of Django, the book starts by introducing the main design concepts in Django. Next, it leads you through the process of installing Django on your system. After that, you will start right away on building your social bookmarking application using Django. Various Django 1.0 components and sub-frameworks will be explained during this process, and you will learn about them by example. In each chapter, you will build one or more of the features that are essential in Web 2.0 applications, like user management, tags, and AJAX. You will also learn about good software development practices, such as keeping your application secure, and automating testing with unit tests. By the end of the book, you will have built a fully functional real-life Web 2.0 application, and learned how to deploy it to a production server.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Django 1.0 Web Site Development
Credits
About the author
About the reviewer
Preface

History of Django


Django started as an internal project at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in 2003. Often, the web development team there had to implement new features or even entire applications within hours. Therefore, Django was created to meet the fast deadlines of journalism web sites, while at the same time keeping the development process clean and maintainable. By the summer of 2005, Django became mature enough to handle several high-traffic sites, and the developers decided to release it to the public as an open source project. The project was named after the jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt.

Now that Django is an open source project, it has gathered developers and users from all over the world. Bug fixes and new features are introduced on a daily basis, and the original development team keeps an eye on the whole process to make sure that Django remains what it is meant to be—a web framework for building clean, maintainable, and reusable web applications.