Introduction to Django

Django is an MVT web framework used to build web applications. Django is an excellent web framework for Python that forces your code to be more easily maintained and has a few other perks. It helps keep your code more maintainable by separating your Python code from your HTML by using an MVC (model, view, and Controller) pattern. It is among the most famous web frameworks out there in the world and it’s one of the most used frameworks as well. It’s used by Instagram, Youtube, Google and even NASA for their website. It is free and open-source, has a thriving and active community, great documentation, and many options for free and paid-for support. So let’s break it down even further to learn more about it.

Features of Django

Following are some of the important features that make Django the first choice of Developers

Scalable

Django is of course, great for getting started and surprisingly enough it’s great when it comes to scaling, too. Django uses a component-based shared-nothing architecture (each part of the architecture is independent of the others, and can hence be replaced or changed if needed). Having a clear separation between the different parts means that it can scale for increased traffic by adding hardware at any level: caching servers, database servers, or application servers.

Secure

Django, by default, prevents a whole lot of common security mistakes better than say, PHP does. To begin with, Django camouflages or hides your site’s source code by dynamically generating web pages and through templates sending information to web browsers, from direct viewing on the Internet. For example, Django provides a secure way to manage user accounts and passwords, avoiding common mistakes like putting session information in cookies where it is vulnerable (instead of cookies just contain a key, and the actual data is stored in the database) or directly storing passwords rather than a password hash.

Versatile

Django is highly versatile enabling it to create applications for different domains. CMS’s, social networks, scientific sites all can be developed quickly by leveraging this highly adaptable and simple platform. It can work with any client-side framework and can deliver content in almost any format (including HTML, RSS feeds, JSON, XML, etc).

Internally, while it provides choices for almost any functionality you might want (e.g. several popular databases, templating engines, etc.), it can also be extended to use other components if needed.

Built-in Admin

The Django team was quite thoughtful when they created the framework, and they kept user and client satisfaction in mind. It’s quite unreasonable to create your own admin interface at the backend just to be able to manage your data with basic CRUD operations. That’s why Django offers an administrative interface right out of the box that is both professional and versatile, according to the documents the developer can now develop with the presentation in mind.

Batteries included

Django adopts the batteries included approach. The former supplies the developers with the necessary resources. It supplies code for common tasks such as security, session management, database manipulation and more. Hence the total web application development period is drastically reduced.

It’s a part of the convention over configuration paradigm that Django is part of, and it allows you to make use of the solutions implemented by world-class professionals. Django batteries span a wide range of topics that include:

Authentication with auth package

Admin interfacing with admin package

Session management with Sessions package

Managing temporary or session-based messages with Messages package

Generating Google sitemap XML with Sitemaps package

Postgres special features with Postgres Package

The Complete Package

It comes with an object-relational mapper in which you describe your database layout in Python code. More than that, the data-model syntax provides many rich ways of representing your models. The migrate command glances overall available models and builds tables in your database for whichever ones that don’t exist.

Maintainable

Django code is written using design principles and patterns that encourage the creation of maintainable and reusable code. In particular, it makes use of the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle so there is no unnecessary duplication, reducing the amount of code. Django also promotes the grouping of related functionality into reusable “applications” and, at a lower level, groups related code into modules.

How it Works

Following are some of the important features that make Django the first choice of Developers

URLs:

While it is possible to process requests from every single URL via a single function, it is much more maintainable to write a separate view function to handle each resource. A URL mapper is used to redirect HTTP requests to the appropriate view based on the request URL. The URL mapper can also match particular patterns of strings or digits that appear in a URL and pass these to a view function as data.

View:

A view is a request handler function, which receives HTTP requests and returns HTTP responses. Views access the data needed to satisfy requests via models and delegate the formatting of the response to templates.

Models:

Models are Python objects that define the structure of an application’s data and provide mechanisms to manage (add, modify, delete) and query records in the database.

Templates:

A template is a text file defining the structure or layout of a file (such as an HTML page), with placeholders used to represent actual content. A view can dynamically create an HTML page using an HTML template, populating it with data from a model. A template can be used to define the structure of any type of file; it doesn’t have to be HTML!