Installing Python and Django, and Introducing the Movies Store Application
Welcome to Django 5 for the Impatient! This book focuses on the key tasks and concepts to help you learn and build Django applications quickly. It is designed for those of you who don’t need all the details about Django, except for those that you really need to know. By the end of this book, you will be confident in creating your own Django projects.
So, what’s Django? Django is a free, open-source web framework for building modern Python web applications. Django helps you quickly build web apps by abstracting away many of the repetitive challenges involved in building a website, such as connecting to a database, handling security, enabling user authentication, creating URL routes, displaying content on a page through templates and forms, supporting multiple database backends, and setting up an admin interface.
This reduction in repetitive tasks allows developers to focus on building a web application’s functionality, rather than reinventing the wheel for standard web application functions.
Django is one of the most popular frameworks available and is used by established companies such as Instagram, Pinterest, Mozilla, and National Geographic. It is also easy enough to be used by start-ups and to build personal projects.
There are other popular frameworks, such as Flask in Python and Express in JavaScript (for more information on Express, see Beginning Node.js, Express & MongoDB Development by Greg Lim: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TWDNMHJ/). However, these frameworks only provide the minimum required functionality for a simple web page, and developers have to do more foundational work, such as installing and configuring third-party packages on their own for basic website functionality.
In this chapter, we are going to get acquainted with the application we are going to build, using Django 5, and get ready to develop our project by installing and setting up everything we need. By the end of the chapter, you will have successfully created your development environment.
In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:
- Introducing and installing Python
- Introducing and installing Django
- Creating and running a Django project
- Understanding the Movies Store application
- Introducing Django MVT architecture
