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Introduction to Django
Author: Juan Pedro Fisanotti
Python is my favorite language, though I’m quite fond of Ruby and
Lisp; Django is the web framework I like the most, Linux user
(Ubuntu) from not too long ago, and free software enthusiast.
Nowadays I mostly work with Python :)
So, ¿what’s Django In a few words: it is a web development framework. That is to say: a
set of libraries and tools that will allow us to create websites. As you probably imagine,
it’s written in Python so it will also be Python (with all its benefits) the language that we
use to create our websites.
Django is free software, so we have access to its source code to learn, understand,
enhance it, etc. It also has a big and active community that helps keep it up to date, have
bugs detected and squashed, an updated and detailed documentation, and some other
advantages we’ll later see (spoiler: a lot of useful applications already developed!).
The original talk was titled “Mini-introduction to Django” but the written version wasn’t
so “mini”.
What’s more, it is good to know that Django has a well-defined philosophy, influenced by
the environment it came from. The original Django creators worked building sites for
news companies, where most of the times changes were needed within hours or days.
Being a “perfectionist” group of developers their challenge was meet deadlines writing
code the right way and not compromising to get it out the door faster.
Its from there that comes the saying that Django is “the web framework for
perfectionists with deadlines”. Django not only aids us in developing, it also actually
helps us write good code.
Finally, it is a framework that tries to be flexible, not get in between the developer and
what he wants to accomplish. That’s why it is very simple replace the parts of Django we
don’t like for others we like more or are more useful.
Introductions out of the way (provided I didn’t bore you to death and caused you to stop
reading), let’s get to know Django.
The first important thing to know is what Django proposes for our sites’ structure: