Why Django?

Django is a web framework based around Python, one of the most popular and easy-to-learn coding languages out there. Since Python is the go-to language for data science and artificial intelligence/machine learning, developers can easily learn Django without having to learn an additional language for building web applications.

Django’s tagline, “Django – The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines,” proves its commitment to faster and more efficient development, further emphasized by its batteries-included principle that all the basic and widely used functionalities come out of the box with the framework rather than us having to install additional packages. This gives Django an additional advantage over other frameworks, such as Flask.

What is available with Django?

Django has evolved in the last decade and is currently in version 5.x, which has some promising new features, such as asynchronous support. However, the core modules of Django are still the same, with the same principles. When a new developer wants to learn Django, an organization wants to pick Django for their new project, or a startup with limited resources is looking to pick the perfect framework for their tech stack, they want to know why they should learn about Django. To answer this question, we shall learn more about the features of Django.

Let’s look at the salient features of Django that the framework provides out of the box:

• In any organization, speed of execution is very important for the success of a product. Django was designed to help developers take applications from the concept phase to the product phase at blazing speed.
• Django takes care of user authentication, content administration, site maps, RSS feeds, and many more fundamental web tasks that developers look for in any framework.
• Security is a serious concern for any organization and Django helps developers avoid common security pitfalls.
• Websites such as Mozilla, Instagram, Disqus, and Pinterest all are built using Django, which makes Django a battle-tested framework that scales.
• Django’s versatile framework can be used for different purposes, from content management systems to social networks to scientific computing platforms.

But the question of Django still being relevant is very subjective. Ultimately, it depends upon the use case. We know Django is a good web development framework, however, because more than 55% of the world’s internet traffic comes from mobile devices using Android or IOS apps, you may be wondering whether Django is relevant for building features for mobile users? Django as a standalone framework might not be sufficient for today’s modern web development where more and more organizations are moving towards API first development, but when integrated with frameworks like Django Rest Framework (DRF), Tastypie, etc, Django becomes the go-to framework for developers.

For start-ups with limited time and resources, it becomes even more crucial to choose a framework where they don’t have to build every feature from the ground up, but rather leverage the framework to do most of the heavy lifting.

Let’s quickly look a little more at the framework principle that Django uses: the MVT framework.

What is the MVT framework?

Most of us have heard of MVC frameworks (Model-View-Controller), which represent a paradigm of modern web frameworks where we have the following:

• Model represents the data and business logic layer
• View represents how the data is presented to the user in the UI/design layout
• Controller updates the model and/or view based on the user’s input

Django considers the standard names debatable, hence why it has its own interpretation of MVC. Here, we have the following:

• View represents which data is shown to the end user and not how the data is represented
• Template represents how the data is represented to the end user
• Model represents the data layer

That’s why Django follows the MVT framework (Model-View-Template). But now, the question is, what is the controller in Django? The framework itself is the controller since it handles the whole routing logic using its built-in features.

Important note

You don’t need to deep dive into MVT concepts since this concept becomes muscle memory as you write more code in Django.

MVT is a concept where we use templates, but in today’s world, most of the products are built for multiple domains such as mobile, IoT, and SaaS platforms. To build products for all these domains, the developer ecosystem has also evolved; now, organizations are moving toward an API-first development approach (https://blog.postman.com/what-is-an-api-first-company/). This means that APIs are “first-class citizens”; every feature in the product is built with an API-first model, which helps in creating a better client (mobile apps, frontend applications, and so on) and server integration. It involves establishing a contract between the client and the server so that each team can work in parallel without much dependency. Once both teams finish their work, the integration and development cycle of a product becomes much faster with a better developer experience.

The growing use case of mobile device means it is important to build platform-agnostic backend APIs that can be consumed by any client, Android app, iOS app, browser frameworks, and so on. Is Django, as an individual MVT framework, able to serve all these needs? No. The amount of additional effort required to use the out-of-the-box features of Django for creating APIs is similar to reinventing the wheel. That’s why most organizations use Django’s REST framework, along with Django, to create APIs.

Important note

In this book, instead of focusing on templates and standalone web applications built with Django, we shall focus on creating APIs using Django with DRF. For information on getting started with just Django, one of my favorite resources is the Django Girls tutorial: https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/.

Now that we have seen what the MVT framework is and how Django is an MVT framework, let’s create a basic Hello World web application using Django and set up our project structure and development environment.