This, of course, meant lots of work for Simon, Adrian, and later Jacob Kaplan Moss who had joined their team; with very short deadlines, sometimes with only a few hours' notice. Since it was the early days of web development in Python, they had to write web applications mostly from scratch. So, to save precious time, they gradually refactored out the common modules and tools into something called "The CMS."

Eventually, the content management parts were spun off into a separate project called the Ellington CMS, which went on to become a successful commercial CMS product. The rest of "The CMS" was a neat underlying framework that was general enough to be used to build web applications of any kind.

By July 2005, this web development framework was released as Django (pronounced Jang-Oh) under an open source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. It was named after the legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Due to its humble origins as an internal tool, Django had a lot of Lawrence Journal-World-specific oddities. To make Django truly general purpose, an effort dubbed "Removing the Lawrence" was already underway.

However, the most significant refactoring effort that Django developers had to undertake was called "Removing the Magic." This ambitious project involved cleaning up all the warts Django had accumulated over the years, including a lot of magic (an informal term for implicit features) and replacing them with a more natural and explicit Pythonic code. For example, the model classes used to be imported from a magic module called django.models.*, rather than directly importing them from the models.py module they were defined in.

At that time, Django had about a hundred thousand lines of code, and it was a significant rewrite of the API. On May 1, 2006, these changes, almost the size of a small book, were integrated into Django's development version trunk and released as Django release 0.95. This was a significant step toward the Django 1.0 milestone.

Every year, conferences called DjangoCons are held across the world for Django developers to meet and interact with each other. They have an adorable tradition of giving a semi-humorous keynote on "why Django sucks." This could be a member of the Django community, or someone who works on competing web frameworks or just any notable personality.

Over the years, it is amazing how Django developers took these criticisms positively and mitigated them in subsequent releases. Here is a short summary of the improvements corresponding to what once used to be a shortcoming in Django and the release they were resolved in:

Over time, Django has become one of most idiomatic Python codebases in public domain. Django source code is also a great place to learn a Python web framework's architecture.

To truly appreciate Django, you will need to peek under the hood and see the various moving parts inside. This can be both enlightening and overwhelming. If you are already familiar with this, you might want to skip this section.

How web requests are processed in a typical Django application

The preceding figure shows the simplified journey of a web request from a visitor's browser to your Django application and back. The numbered paths are as follows:

Though certain details are omitted, this representation should help you appreciate Django's high-level architecture. It also show the roles played by the key components, such as models, views, and templates. Many of Django's components are based on several well-known design patterns.

One of the earliest efforts to study and document design patterns was a book titled Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, who later became known as the Gang of Four (GoF). This book is so influential that many consider the 23 design patterns in the book as fundamental to software engineering itself.

In reality, the patterns were written primarily for object-oriented programming languages, and it had code examples in C++ and Smalltalk. As we will see shortly, many of these patterns might not be even required in other programming languages with better higher-order abstractions such as Python.

The 23 patterns have been broadly classified by their type as follows:

While a detailed explanation of each pattern would be beyond the scope of this book, it would be interesting to identify some of these patterns in Django itself:

While these patterns are mostly of interest to those studying the internals of Django, the pattern under which Django itself can be classified under—is a common question.

Model-View-Controller (MVC) is an architectural pattern invented by Xerox PARC in the 70s. Being the framework used to build user interfaces in Smalltalk, it gets an early mention in the GoF book.

Today, MVC is a very popular pattern in web application frameworks. Beginners often ask the question—is Django an MVC framework?

The answer is both yes and no. The MVC pattern advocates the decoupling of the presentation layer from the application logic. For instance, while designing an online game website API, you might present a game's high scores table as an HTML, XML, or comma-separated (CSV) file. However, its underlying model class would be designed independent of how the data would be finally presented.

MVC is very rigid about what models, views, and controllers do. However, Django takes a much more practical view to web applications. Due to the nature of the HTTP protocol, each request for a web page is independent of any other request. Django's framework is designed like a pipeline to process each request and prepare a response.

Django calls this the Model-Template-View (MTV) architecture. There is separation of concerns between the database interfacing classes (Model), request-processing classes (View), and a templating language for the final presentation (Template).

If you compare this with the classic MVC—"Model" is comparable to Django's Models, "View" is usually Django's Templates, and "Controller" is the framework itself that processes an incoming HTTP request and routes it to the correct view function.

If this has not confused you enough, Django prefers to name the callback function to handle each URL a "view" function. This is, unfortunately, not related to the MVC pattern's idea of a View.

In 2002, Martin Fowler wrote Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, which described 40 or so patterns he often encountered while building enterprise applications.

Unlike the GoF book, which described design patterns, Fowler's book was about architectural patterns. Hence, they describe patterns at a much higher level of abstraction and are largely programming language agnostic.

Fowler's patterns are organized as follows:

Almost all of these patterns would be useful to know while architecting a Django application. In fact, Fowler's website at http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/ has an excellent catalog of these patterns. I highly recommend that you check them out.

Django also implements a number of these patterns. The following table lists a few of them:

Yes, of course. Patterns are discovered all the time. Like living beings, some mutate and form new patterns: take, for instance, MVC variants such as Model–view–presenter (MVP), Hierarchical model–view–controller (HMVC), or Model View ViewModel (MVVM).

Patterns also evolve with time as better solutions to known problems are identified. For example, Singleton pattern was once considered to be a design pattern but now is considered to be an Anti-pattern due to the shared state it introduces, similar to using global variables. An Anti-pattern can be defined as commonly reinvented but a bad solution to a problem.

Some of the other well-known books which catalog patterns are Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture (known as POSA) by Buschmann, Meunier, Rohnert, Sommerlad, and Sta; Enterprise Integration Patterns by Hohpe and Woolf; and The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience by Duyne, Landay, and Hong.

Despite their near universal usage, Patterns have their share of criticism too. The most common arguments against them are as follows:

While some of the previous criticisms are quite valid, they are based on how patterns are misused. Here is some advice that can help you understand how best to use design patterns:

Generally, the Python community uses the term 'Pythonic' to describe a piece of idiomatic code. It typically refers to the principles laid out in 'The Zen of Python'. Written like a poem, it is extremely useful to describe such a vague concept.

Furthermore, Django developers have crisply documented their design philosophies while designing the framework at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/misc/design-philosophies/.

While the document describes the thought process behind how Django was designed, it is also useful for developers using Django to build applications. Certain principles such as Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY), loose coupling, and tight cohesion can help you write more maintainable and idiomatic Django applications.

Django or Python best practices suggested by this book would be formatted in the following manner: