First-Python/Django-App

by Bedig, Fiona, & Dan

Why Python/Django?

Python is a powerful, flexible, open source language that is easy to learn, easy to use, and has powerful libraries for data manipulation and analysis. ... According to the TIOBE index, Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, ranking higher than Perl, Ruby, and JavaScript by a wide margin. Some other strong features: conditional logic, abstract data types, dictionaries.

Django is a high-level Python Web Framework that takes care of much of the hassle of Web development, allowing us to focus on writing our app. It is a lightweight server for development and testing, it includes many strong features such as CSRF (Cross-site request forgery) security feature.

What problem does it solve?

• It allows you to divide code modules into logical groups to make it flexible to change
• To ease the website administration, it provides auto-generated web admin
• It provides pre-packaged API for common user tasks
• It gives you template system to define HTML template for your web page to avoid code duplication
• It enables you to define what URL be for a given function
• It enables you to separate business logic from the HTML
• Everything is in python (python is a pretty friendly language)

Why does one use it?

In comparison to its competition, python has really grown as a scientific community. So it's great to use when your work involves natural language processing, geolocation, scientific computing ,and numerical computing.

History

Django was born in the fall of 2003, when the web programmers at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison, began using Python to build applications. It was released publicly under a BSD license in July 2005. The framework was named after guitarist Django Reinhardt.

It is open-sourced and maintained by the Django Software Foundation.

What is your opinion on the technology after having built something with it?

It was easy to use and easy to learn. It has the same structure as most language framworks (MVC).

What are the biggest conceptual hurdles (if any) you encountered when researching this?

I noticed that although it was a lot more straight forward. The code seem to be less DRY.

What resources do you recommend for interested students?

This a great site for beginners. https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers

What are 3 interview questions one might be asked about this technology?

1. What are the features available in Django?

Answer: Features available in Django are

Admin Interface (CRUD) CSRF (Cross-site request forgery) security feature Templating Form handling Internationalization Session, user management, role-based permissions Object-relational mapping (ORM) Testing Framework Fantastic Documentation

2. What are the components of the architecture of Django?

Answer: Django architecture consists of

Models: It describes your database schema and your data structure Views: It controls what a user sees, the view retrieves data from appropriate models and execute any calculation made to the data and pass it to the template Templates: It determines how the user sees it. It describes how the data received from the views should be changed or formatted for display on the page Controller: The Django framework and URL parsing.

3. What is Django?

Answer: Django is a web framework in python to develop a web application in python

4. How do you install a virtual environment?

Answer: pip install virtualenv

Necessary Instructions

1. brew install python3
2. install pip
3. run server (python manage.py run server)