Django is a Python-based free open-source web framework. The Django Framework was developed in the fall of 2003 by web programmers Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, while working for the Lawrence Journal-World Newspaper, Kansas, who began to use Python language to build applications.
Let us understand some important events in the journey of Django Framework and what was the reason for its creation:
Django was created due to the requirement of the journalists at Lawrence Journal-World Newspaper, who demanded new features and updates to be added and entire applications to be built in a very short span of time, often in a few days or even hours.
Due to this reason, Adrian and Simon developed a framework which was not just time-saving but using it they could easily create maintainable application within deadline.
In July 2005, the framework was released as an open-source software and it was named Django after the guitarist Django Reinhardt.
In June 2008, the Django Software Foundation(DSF) was created to maintain Django.
As Django was created to cater the needs of news environment, it has been particularly used to provide the public broadcasting services for the websites like Instagram, The Washington Times, Mozilla, Nextdoor, Ebay, etc.
Django supports MTV architecture
Django supports MTV architecture, where M stands for model, V stands for view and T stands for template: -
Model - It is a Python class that contains a description of a database table. Using this class, you can create, retrieve, delte and update records in your database.
View- It is a Python class that contains the business logic and deals with user requests.
Template - It is an HTML Template file that describes the design of a webpage.
Using Django, we can create a web application in which the code for defining and accessing the data i.e. data-access logic is implemented in Model and it is separated from the presentation logic, defined in an HTML Template file, which is also separated from business logic, implemented in View.
Advantages of Django
Easy to code: Django is based on Python and its core libraries are written in Python. To develop a website using Django, you just have to code in Python and use its libraries.
Python is considered as one of the easiest languages to learn and code.
Thus, one of the greatest strength of using Django Framework is its code readability because a Python program is much simple and easier to understand as compared to the code written in C, C++ or Java.
Reliable: Using Django, we could create applications that are not easy and fast to create but also perform very well under immense load and that's why, Django is used to create reliable applications.
Using the important features of Python like "Garbage Collection" frees a programmer from worrying about
memory management. Another feature of Python - Exception Handling, reduces the possibility of a sudden crash of a Django application and thus
boosts its reliability.
Suited for Content Sites: As Django was created to cater the needs of news environment, it has been particularly used to provide the public broadcasting services for the websites like Instagram, The Washington Times, Mozilla, Nextdoor, Ebay, etc. Thus, Django can be particularly used to create a website that provide public broadcasting services.
Loosely Coupled:
Django supports an MTV architecture, which allows us to create a loosely coupled web-application by separating the data access logic(model), presentation layer(template) and the business logic(view) , in a way that changing one piece of a Django application does not impact another.
Interoperability: Using Django, we could create an advanced web application that wants to access the hardware and perform low-level data structure manipulations. You may ask how? Well, here is an answer.
For creating a web application in Django, you just have to code in Python and use its libraries.
Although Python is a very powerful high-level programming language, it cannot directly access hardware and perform low-level data structure manipulations, at the same time, Python being an interoperable language can be integrated
with other low-level programming languages like C, allow us to create an interoperable web application.
Thus, Django suppots interoperability between different programming languages.
Note: Did you know that one of the most widely used applications, Instagram, uses the
Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python.
A Comprehensive Library : One of the biggest advantages of Django is its vast standard library which provides us many important modules and functions, using which we could perform several complicated tasks while creating a web application in only a few lines of code.
Apart from using its standard library, we could use Python libraries, as well as third-party libraries, which allow us to perform specialized tasks with ease.
An example of an important third-party library is NumPy, which provides us high-level mathematical functions to work with arrays, matrices and manipulating numerical data.
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Some important features of Django
Django Template System
By using Django Template System, we could separate the HTML file, which is carrying the presentation logic from the python file, which is carrying the business logic i.e. the view function, and could link these separate files. For more, you may begin with Django Template System.
Django Model
A Django model is a Python class which corresponds to a database table. A model class contains data about your data.
Each model class contains one or more fields, where each field represents a database column in the same database table.
To begin with model in Django, you may read our tutorial Django Model.
Django with database
The whole purpose of using Django is to create sophisticated "content" web applications and could easily perform database manipulations. For
our detailed tutorial on how to connect Django framework with database, please read Django with database.
Django with Forms
One of the fundamental feature of a web application is an HTML form, which is a collection of form elements such as a textbox, checkbox, submit buttons, etc. These form elements allow us to take input from the user and send the collected input to the server.
To learn how to create HTML forms using Django Framework, you may read our tutorial:
Django with Forms.
Django with Cookies
A cookie is one of the most common ways to track a user on the internet. Cookie is a file using which you can store the information in a user's browser and access it when you need it to communicate with the user or to manage the user's session. To know how to perform user session management by using cookies with Django, you may read:
Django with Cookies.
Django File Upload
Django can be used to create a web application which allows a user to upload a file to the server and to know how Django handles the whole process of file uploading, please read Django File Uploading.
Django Serialization and Deserialization -
Using Django, we can perform the serialization and deserialization an object of Django's model class. This helps us by saving the state of an object, so that later on it could be shared by a remote location through the network.
For more on this, please read: Django Serialization and Deserialization.
Exceptions
An exception is an unusual exceptional condition or an error, which occurs during the runtime of a Python program.
To know about the various types of Django exceptions and how to handle exceptions in a Django project,
you may begin at Django Exceptions.
