Python Django Web Framework

When you are interested in developing a web application using Python, Django is one of the best choices. In recent years, it has gained a lot of popularity among developers.

In this article, we will see an overview of the Django web framework. We will also see some of its features and advantages. Let us start with the introduction to Django.

What is Django Framework of Python?

Django is a full-stack Python web framework that helps in developing a maintainable and secure application in an easy way and in a shorter time. It is a free and open-source framework and also has an active community to maintain regularly. It focuses on automation and follows the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle.

Django can be used to solve the problems like connectivity with databases, other server problems, SEO solutions, etc. One can import the facilities it provides based on the requirement of the application or project. This helps the developer to focus on the unique features of the website rather than dealing with all the backend problems.

Origin of Django

The development of Django started between 2003 and 2005. A web team, who was creating and maintaining newspaper websites initiated this framework. They observed that they reuse a lot of code and design patterns while building different websites. This common code was summed up to form a generic web development framework named Django. It was a name given after a guitarist Django Reinhardt.

It got released publicly as a BSD license in July 2005. Since then, Django has continued to grow and improve. Its first milestone (1.0) was released in September 2008 and now we have the latest version 3.1, released in 2020. In addition to fixing bugs, each release has also added new functionality. It supports databases, template engines, and caching, etc.

Now it is a popular, collaborative open source project, used and contributed by a large crowd. Though it still has some features that reflect its origin, it has developed into a versatile framework that can be used to build any type of website. It solves some major issues for web developers since its existence.

Is Django Opinionated or Unopinionated?

Opinionated frameworks are the ones that have the opinions on the right way to handle any task. They have ways of handling tasks well-documented. However, these can be less flexible as they deal with problems in a particular domain and tend to offer fewer choices of approaches.

Unopinionated frameworks have fewer restrictions on the ways to do tasks and on the components that should be used. They make it easier for developers to use the most suitable tools to complete a particular task, except the fact that one should find those components.

When we talk about Django, it is quite an opinionated framework. It delivers the best features of both types. It provides a set of components to handle most of the tasks and one (or two) preferred ways to use them. However, Django’s decoupled architecture allows either to choose one of the different options or add support for completely new ones.

Prerequisites to learn Django

Before starting to learn Django, one needs to have some prior knowledge of Python and should have some basic idea of the Command-line interface/PowerShell for windows or Terminal for Mac/Linux operating system. Hold on to these topics will help the learner to easily understand the concepts related to Django.

Why choose Django as a Framework?

Before learning any concept, we should know why we are learning it. So, now we will see various reasons to learn Django. Django offers lots of facilities to develop a web application. Since it is based on Python, which is a user-friendly and powerful language, Django gives ease to the developer. Hence, it is worth learning Django.

Let us see some more features that prove the above statement:

1. It has Evolved Over Time

Since the release of Django, it has been improving itself regularly by releasing new versions. Also, it has been in the industry for more than a decade which shows the stability of Django.

It has fixed lots of its security issues and has introduced lots of functionalities taking into concern the new requirements with the increase in technology.

2. Open-Source

It is an open-source technology, which sometimes may be understood that the documents are not given much priority. But it is not true for Django.
Since its release, it has been updating its documentation well and it has always proved to be a great help for the developers.

3. One of the Best Community

The community that works for this framework is one of the best communities. They give support to all the projects and resolve all the queries they can. No doubt why its community is growing at a fast pace and many are shifting towards Django. It also has a good future scope and can help a developer to use it in a resume.

4. Contains Pre-Made Apps

It also has lots of packages which can be used by anyone. These packages can be easily found in the documentation. One need not write the code from scratch, instead, you can use the packages. And thus resulting in the rapid development of the application.

Features of Django

We know that Django has been seeing growth in users for the past few years. One of the main reasons is its features. In this section, let us discuss some of the other important features of Django.

1. Stability

Most of the time, Django is amongst the first frameworks to employ new vulnerabilities. This shows that it updates itself with the increase in the needs of the users and that it is a time-tested framework. In addition, it has also fixed most of its bugs in the released version from that of the previous one.

2. Well Maintained Documentation

Despite being an open-source framework, it holds excellent documentation that is maintained regularly. This is one of the features that set Django apart from other open-source projects. And in this regard, it has been expanding over time.

3. Highly Scalable

Scalability is an important aspect that is checked for when using the technology, especially when one is dealing with large projects with wide coverage. Django has component-based architecture where all its components work independently. So, it can handle any hardware at any level like database, servers, web servers, and cache servers.

Besides supporting the small projects, Django works well with the bigger ones. Do you know Instagram and Pinterest use Django for maintaining their huge active users?

4. Handles Security Issues

By default, Django resolves lots of security issues. It dynamically generates web pages and uses templates to send information to web-browsers, from direct viewing of the internet. During this process, it checks for ant issues and tries to resolve them.

5. Employs SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process for increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website for better search engine results. The websites are ranked by the search engine algorithms based on the keywords in their URL.

Often, web development and SEO are interrelated. But with Django, this issue is faced rarely. This is because it uses human-readable website URLs, which improves the search engines. This aspect helps both the users and the SEO algorithms.

6. Huge Number of Packages

We discussed that the Django community is very huge and supportive. In addition, they provide developers with packages for almost everything one may need while building a website. One can also create management systems according to their needs easily.

7. Portable

Django can run on many server platforms. One can run the applications on many platforms of Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It is also well-supported by many web hosting providers. So it gets infrastructure and documentations for hosting its sites.

8. Allows Pragmatic and Robust Design

Django is a full-stack web app framework that provides an ease to develop a website at a full scale. Also, its code is written scratch rather than importing some of the Python libraries.

Django Architecture

A web application framework is a tool that provides the developer pre-written components and modules for building web applications easily.

We have discussed a lot of features above that make Django an efficient and easy to use framework. Django is based on Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which consists of the following three parts:

1. Model: It is the logical data structure of the complete application and uses a database, generally relational databases such as MySQL, Postgres, etc., for representation.

2. View: It is a user interface that one can see on visiting a website on a browser. These are represented through HTML/CSS/JavaScript files.

3. Controller: The Controller is the intermediate that connects the view and model. It acts as a gate for both the Model and the View to share data and communicate.

In this architecture, the application mainly deals with the model by either displaying or manipulating it. For example, when a user enters a URL in the browser, that request will be sent, via internet protocols(HTTP), to the server. This server is what we call Django. Then Django will process the given URL. If the URL matches, it will call the Controller which will take the required data from the user’s database and then gives it to the View.

Advantages of Python Django

We have discussed a lot Django. Let us also discuss some of the advantages it gives when compared to the other frameworks.

1. Loose Coupling and Tight bound

Django framework is loosely coupled and tightly bound. This means that various layers or components of the framework work independently and connect only when it is necessary. This also makes the application build using Django more secure.

2. Lesser Code

Django contains pre-written apps in the documentation and these can be used by any developer. This helps the developer have less code to write.
In addition, Django is written from scratch without the use of any Python libraries. And this code is more optimized and efficient for web apps.

3. No Repetition

Multiple copies of code need more storage and give less functionality. Especially for the web apps, if the code is bulky then it needs more bandwidth to load the website to the user.
Since Django has applications written for all of the tasks, one does not have to write anything that repeats in other websites and can focus on their website.

4. Consistency

The web applications act as mediators between different technologies. So, consistency is important for a framework. Django is consistent at all levels, for both big and small projects.

5. Versatile

Django can be used to build almost any type of website, including content management systems, wikis, social networks, scientific computing platforms, news sites, and even big organizations. It can work with any client-side framework and can deliver content in almost any format ( HTML, JSON, XML, etc). While it provides choices for a lot of functionalities (e.g. databases, templating engines, etc.), one can extend to use other components.

Applications of Django Framework

Finally, let us see some of the big companies using Django frameworks for maintaining their apps.

1. YouTube

YouTube is one of the world’s widely used video hosting platforms. It is a great way to watch content, for multiple purposes including studies, entertainment, cooking, etc. Initially, PHP was used, but now they are using Django. There are multiple reasons for this. Some include more rapid development, handling a huge number of active users, maintaining the security and speed of the website.

2. Instagram

Instagram is one of the popular social media apps. Django is at the core of Instagram’s web page. And also they have become a gold-level sponsor of the Django Software Foundation (DSF). Django also has integration with iOS and Android apps helping Instagram to handle millions of users at the same time.

3. Spotify

Spotify has recently become a favorite app for music lovers. It uses machine-learning models written in Python for handling user’s feeds, etc. And to integrate things, it uses Django for its web applications. Thus, this app is built using Python.

4. Disqus

Developers of Disqus used python and Django to build the app from scratch. They preferred Django to handle a huge number of active users at the same time. They also used it to make an app named sentry checks for errors using state-of-the-art technology.

Conclusion

We are at the end of the article. We discuss a lot on the Django framework in this article along with their applications. Hoping that this article gave some clarity on the framework to choose. Happy learning!