Django Introduction

Introduction

A set of resources and tools available to web and software developers is referred to as web development or web application frameworks. Web developers may use these frameworks to create and administer web applications, web services, and websites.

Django is one such type of Python web framework for quickly building practical online applications. 

We will learn more about Django in this article. 

What is Django

Django is an open-source Python Web framework that supports quick development and a clean design. A web framework is a collection of components that work together to create websites quickly. Django's primary purpose is to make building complicated database-driven websites easier. Some well-known sites that use Django include Instagram, Bitbucket, Mozilla, and Washington Times.

It enables you to easily construct web applications without the installation or dependency issues that other frameworks are known for. Django provides you with ready-to-use components.

Architecture of Django

The MVT (Model-View-Template) architecture is used by Django. MVT is a web application development software design pattern.

The three parts of the MVT Structure are as follows:

Model: The model will serve as the data's interface. It is in charge of data management. A database represents the logical data structure that underpins the whole program (generally relational databases such as Postgres, MySql).

View: What you see in your browser when you render a website is a View. HTML, CSS, and Javascript files are used to represent it.

Template: A template is made up of static sections of the intended HTML output and specific syntax that describes how dynamic content will be included.

Installing Django

First, make sure you have python installed on your computer. 

We will install Django in a Python virtual environment. So first, use the below command to install virtualenv. 

pip install virtualenv

 

When you set up the virtual environment, you'll be able to alter the dependency in a way that your system wouldn't usually allow.

To establish a virtual environment, follow these steps.

python -m virtualenv .

 

The above command creates a virtual environment. 

.\scripts\activate

 

The above command activates the virtual environment. 

Now use the below command to install Django.

pip install django

 

To create a Django project, run the following command in the terminal.

django-admin startproject project

 

Enter the folder project. 

cd project

 

Now run the server.

python manage.py runserver

 

Now visit the site. You will see the following page.

Now we will be creating an App. 

To create an app, navigate to the directory containing manage.py and run the following command in the terminal. 

python manage.py startapp homeApp

 

Your directory structure will be as follows. 

Now we need to include the name of the app (homeApp in our case) in the INSTALLED_APPS list in settings.py.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'homeApp'
]

 

So, we've finally finished building an app, but in order to render it using URLs, we'll need to include it in our main project so that URLs pointed to it may be rendered.

Open the urls.py file in the homeApp folder. Append the following code at the top of the file.

from django.urls import include 

 

You must now include the app name in the list of URL patterns in order to include your app URLs.

So, after all the changes, the urls.py file becomes the following.

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path,
from django.urls import include


urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('', include("homeApp.urls")),
]

 

This was the primary step of App in Django. 

Practice this code with the help of Online Python Compiler

Advantages of Django

• Django has extensive documentation and a large user base. 
• Switching databases in the Django framework is fairly simple.
• Django is a complete framework that requires no other software and is highly scalable.
• It features a built-in admin interface that makes working with it simple.
• Last but not least, Django is based on Python, which offers an extensive library and functions such as web scraping, machine learning, image processing, scientific computing, and so on. All of this may be integrated with a web application, allowing for a wide range of advanced functionality.

FAQs

1. What is Django?
   Django is an open-source Python Web framework that supports quick development and a clean design. It's built by professional developers to take care of a lot of the headaches of web development so you can concentrate on developing your app instead of reinventing the wheel.
    
2. Why should one use Django instead of other web frameworks?
   Django is the best web application framework since it allows developers to use modules to speed up development. You can use these modules as a developer to create apps and websites from an existing source. Because you don't have to code everything from the start, it considerably speeds up the development process.
    
3. Is Django stable?
   Yes, it is very stable. Django has been used by companies such as Disqus, Instagram, Pinterest, and Mozilla for a long time. Django-based websites have been able to withstand traffic spikes of up to 50 thousand hits per second.

Key Takeaways

Congratulations on making it this far.

We learned about the Python web framework Django, its advantages, and its basic functionalities in this blog. 

If you want to become proficient with Python programming, I suggest you take the Coding Ninjas Python Course, which will teach Python basics with Data Structures and Algorithms.