Building an enterprise

Building an Enterprise Application Software (EAS) is not an easy task to tackle. The task requires many different technical specialists all working together with a high level of collaboration and preplanning to complete. Failure to perform adequate planning can result in the project taking far more time and money than anticipated. Important features that your business model relies on could be left out of the equation, resulting in disruptions in everyday flow when a new system turns on.

Enterprise-level software is geared toward satisfying the needs of a business as a whole. EAS takes all of the business logic of an organization and encompasses that into one system, thought of as a collection of many smaller subsystems. The software eliminates the need for paperwork, reduces the steps involved in completing a task, and provides self-automated or even artificially intelligent solutions to all kinds of problems in the world today. The website itself is only a small fraction of what the entire system actually comprises.

Reasons to choose enterprise-level applications

Enterprise-level software is usually thought of as a solution for organizations that already have a system in place and need to improve upon that. Whether or not that system is something digital or a manual process, as in paper in filing cabinets, companies are always searching for ways to simplify everyday tasks. Thus, enterprise-level software can consist of one or a collection of many different consumer-level applications. If you need more than just a website and need a system that also takes on your business management tasks, you will likely need to scale up to the enterprise level. However, Django can still be used for the simplest of websites as well as large-scale projects beyond your wildest dreams. Applications can also be broken down into individual Django projects.

Let's say you have an organization with many departments and many users, all consisting of different permission roles. You need a way to connect them all so that they may generate and share reports, send notifications, store and manage customer/user data, create invoices, and work with other systems. Maybe you found that your organization needs to connect employees working remotely from home to be more productive and efficient at their job. The idea is that each user type will interact with the system in a completely different way and even have different permission levels granting them access to different parts of your system.

Generally speaking, when someone thinks enterprise level, they also think of something that is unique and custom crafted. Such software is termed proprietary or closed-source software and is not intended to be redistributed to the public by any means. However, not all EAS has to be proprietary; the distribution license can be set to anything you desire it to be. For example, the main system may be branded for one parent company and yet parts of the system may be branded for its subsidiaries, or copies can be distributed and rebranded per your license agreement. It may also be a good idea to speak with a technical lawyer to help write your software license agreement should your project(s) be extremely complex. Inviting the help of a technical lawyer at the beginning is a good way to prevent lawsuits later on.

Next, we will discuss some of the major types of enterprise systems.

Types of enterprise systems

There are many different kinds of enterprise-level systems but we can consolidate them into six major categories, as follows:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Enterprise Information System (EIS)

In this book, we will not actually be building any of these systems in their entirety. Instead, we will touch on the key Django programming concepts that, when combined, will get you part of the way to the end zone. Not every concept can fit into this book but Django is fully capable of handling all of the features that each of these types of systems includes. It is really up to your team to take on each of the rest of the concepts discussed in this book and use them as another tool in your toolbox when building your system. Let's discuss briefly what each of these six major types of enterprise-level systems is and what they are primarily used for.

Customer Relationship Management

CRM systems can typically be thought of as lead management, marketing communications, sales and inventory control, retail management, and so much more. The systems can be thought of as everything but the actual selling of products and services. They can even go further to include customer support and data analytics. These systems are designed to develop better relationships with your business partners, customers and potential customers, and anyone else in the equation.

Enterprise Content Management

An ECM system can best be described as a system for people working in fields that deal with creative and other intellectual property in some kind of way. Newspapers, magazines, and other news companies today have a great deal of content that they make available to the internet on a daily basis. A Content Management System (CMS) provides a less technical and rapid way to build new pages and enter that content onto the web. Enterprise level just means you are adding more and more tools to your toolbox for your organization to use.

Enterprise Asset Management

In an EAM system, products and inventory of all kinds can be entered into a system in the same way as a CMS. This is often known as an e-commerce or shopping cart website. It's where you make your physical goods and assets available online. These systems allow the tracking of inventory, project management, and document control, such as contracts and other legal documents. These systems may even consist of physical assets, such as real estate, automobiles, and music records.

Enterprise Resource Planning

An ERP system is typically thought of as a way to manage people, the employees of the company, or what is commonly known as the Human Resources (HR) department. The system can handle on-boarding and off-boarding procedures and store all personnel records. It could serve as a tool for project management, risk assessment, and record keeping. It can even serve as a knowledge base such as in the form of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) area. A knowledge base is often used to point people to and have them find common questions and answers in order to reduce the workload on your staff. These can also be used for training purposes, such as generating quizzes or asking trivia questions and playing tutorials.

Supply Chain Management

SCM systems are similar to CRM and EAM systems. These are systems that manage inventory in every aspect of its development in the supply chain. These systems manage inventory on a national or even a global scale. They communicate with suppliers, connect to buyers, track packages, predict future supply orders, and may even automatically place those orders. One way to look at the difference between a CRM and SCM system is that a CRM is mostly used for sales and marketing while an SCM is mostly used for production and distribution. Both deal with products but in different ways and a large company or a conglomerate would need both.

Enterprise Information System

An EIS is a system that generally combines a CRM and SCM system to handle a wider range of business needs. An EIS may even integrate some or all of an ERP system and act as one giant central nervous system. Depending on the needs, this may consist of numerous databases and even numerous development projects all working together, comprising the brains of everything. These systems are known for storing and processing large volumes of data and connecting many different systems all together into one.

We will now take a look at why people gravitate toward using Python and Django when they are building any of these enterprise-level systems. We'll see why it suits a variety of projects and what features it is best known for.

Why Python/Django?

Python was created in 1991 by Guido van Rossum. He came up with the name Python after reading the script for Monty Python's Flying Circus. The language was created primarily for the purpose of code readability and reliability. Python has been growing in popularity as the preferred backend framework for several years now. Python plays an important role in some very popular websites today, such as Google, NASA, Netflix, Spotify, Uber, and Dropbox, just to name a few. The Python language has become desirable among many developers for its ease of use, quickness to learn, and overall adaptability of the code written.

Django came into existence in late 2003 by the newspaper publisher Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas. Similar to Python, it had one goal in mind: to create complex database-driven websites in a simple and easy-to-read way. Along with readability, it was designed with rapid development and a Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) code structure in mind. Readability is why Python was chosen as Django's foundation for the framework. Django is best referred to as a backend framework because of how it works to build and manage databases. It comes with many concepts built in surrounding the architecture of websites, which makes it appealing to most web developers.

Many people use Django today for their backend; but the framework can also serve as your frontend. If you have ever used Shopify's Liquid template language, otherwise known as Liquid syntax, or even ASP.NET's Razor syntax and how that is used in conjunction with C# .NET or Visual Basic .NET, you will notice commonalities with the Django template language, which is Django's method of using Python to build HTML files. Django uses context when the page is rendered to serve up user-generated content or database-driven data onto that page. The template language syntax is fairly easy to read and quick to learn. Some examples of sites that use Django are Bitbucket, Instagram, National Geographic, Spotify, The Washington Post, and YouTube.

Django's features include the following:

• Caching framework
• Data serialization
• Extensibility
• Form handling and validation
• Scalability
• Security
• Template language
• Testing framework

Of these features, extensibility means that Django is built to allow easy integration of other third-party services. Your developers can spend more time focusing on the specific needs of the project versus trying to figure out how to connect your project to a third-party servicer's system. Django makes it easy to connect to virtually anything that exists today. If a functionality doesn't already come built in, there is usually a pip package for it.

Django does not need to be used to build only websites. It can be used to build an API that stands as the central hub for anything, communicating with a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) framework, which is a common architecture for standardizing communication between computer systems on the internet. From here, you can use any variety of common existing tools to build an iOS app for iPhones or even Android apps. Depending on your particular business requirements, deciding to tap into smartphones can be beneficial in many ways. With somewhere around 85% of Americans owning a smartphone today, some companies might want to build an app where a user can install that app on their personal phone (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/), versus the company having to purchase additional hardware to distribute devices to all of their employees. APIs can be used for many other things as well, from microservices to large-scale external web systems and databases.

Personally, when it comes to using the Django template language and a JavaScript-based framework such as React or Angular together, I would recommend against doing that as it can get far too complex to work with. If you are using React, Angular, Vue.js, or Handlebars.js, to name a few, to work as your frontend, then Django would just serve as your backend where context is served up through your API. You can still keep your frontend and backend files in the same Django project folder.

I have a few recommendations to help you choose. If you want to build an Android or iOS app or a Single-Page App (SPA) website, use Django as an API on the backend. Then, for the frontend, you can use a common JavaScript-based framework to build mobile apps. For multipage websites, just use the Django template language along with your context to work as your frontend. There are ways to build an SPA website without the use of React or Angular and just rely on Django alone, but even then, you will still need something such as jQuery, AJAX, or vanilla JavaScript to help you process triggers and events that send requests to your API. I often resort to preloading my base .html file with jQuery, which I will discuss how to do in Chapter 4, URLs, Views, and Templates. Many people prefer to use vanilla JavaScript so that they can write simple tasks without loading the entire jQuery library. When it comes to adding bells and whistles on the frontend of things, in all of the projects that I have worked on, I find that I can pretty much do everything that I need to do with just the Django template language and jQuery. I may be biased on this one but it is really simple to use. However, there are a lot of benefits of using ECMAScript, which is actually a set of international standards for building and compiling JavaScript, such as ES8, ES9, or ES10. Using ECMAScript is something I should be focusing on more in my projects.

Tip

When working with Django and Python, ask your developers to adopt the Python Enhancement Proposal 8 (PEP-8) style guide for Python code. This is an officially adopted formatting guide to keep code consistent among developers. This can be strict or relaxed. Personally, I like to choose a more relaxed version where I can make things a bit more broken down and readable. If you are building something proprietary, for internal use, it is not necessary to follow this exactly and you may prefer to choose a style that your team will be happy with. If you are building a package that will be shared publicly with anyone, I would recommend you follow the PEP-8 format exactly. It may actually be a requirement for submitting a package to the Python Package Index (PyPI) library. You can find out more about the official style guide here: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/.

PyPI is the official repository for third-party Python package libraries both public and private. It's a wonderful resource when looking for new packages to play around with and it provides information on how to work with the code as well: https://pypi.org/.

A package called Black can be used as a code linter to help developers make sure they are following PEP-8 style formatting. You can learn about Black here: https://pypi.org/project/black/.

Next, let's explore what the different types of Application Programming Interface (API) are and why we might need to know about these when planning for a project.

Types of APIs

An API is a means for two systems to communicate with each other through what are known as endpoints or a URL.

We can categorize APIs into three main categories:

Figure 1.1 – Types of APIs

In the following sections, we will discuss what each of these API types is and what they are used for. Depending on the requirements of the project, we may need to choose one or the other as a type of system that we want to build.

Open APIs

Open APIs are open to the public and are sometimes referred to as an external API. This typically means there are no restrictions and anyone can be granted access. Sometimes, a simple registration or API key may be required before developers can gain access but they usually have the freedom to do with it as they wish. These APIs can be open bidirectionally as well, meaning the system is open for all GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests coming to and from your system.

Partner APIs

Partner APIs are commonly found in business-to-business relationships. The general public cannot gain access and permission is only granted to strategic partners who need to use your API in order to do business with you. Limitations can be defined depending on your agreements with each party. These are fairly common in the world today when business mergers occur and your team is tasked with making two external systems communicate with each other. Sometimes, you have to build a central database in between the two existing systems for various reasons, such as your business model is based on granting access to your API in order for companies to sell their goods on your platform. A common example of this is the Amazon Selling Partner API (SP-API), which is used for selling goods on the Amazon Marketplace.

Private APIs

Private APIs are the most secure; these APIs are locked down because they are intended to be used internally by that company or organization only. Large financial institutions or corporate retail entities may use these to manage any aspect of their internal functions. The public and any other external sources may not be granted access unless a specific need for it is warranted. Common examples are government organizations using APIs to connect to systems that keep legal records and documents. Another example could be a university granting an educational department access to student and class records.

By now, we have brushed up on what enterprise-level software is, in terms of what types of enterprise-level systems exist today and how we can classify them. We also discussed how Python and Django play a role in enterprise-level software. Now that we have learned about these various concepts, let's begin designing and planning for a project of our own.