Chapter 7. Building an Application with Django

Django is an open source web application framework written in Python, originally written in 2003 by Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison to quickly address the need for a web-based, database-driven application serving contents to an online newspaper. Django was released to the public as an open source project in 2005, and rapidly gained a strong following. With tens of thousands of users and contributors from all around the world, Django is one of the most adopted web frameworks among the Python community today, supported by an independent, non-profit foundation that promotes the project and protects its intellectual property.

One of the components that have contributed the most to the success of Django is its Object-Relational Mapping (ORM), the data access layer that maps the underlying relational database with some object-oriented code written in Python. At first, what was considered a strong point of the framework turned out to be...