I decided I'd have a look at Django to get a feel for a different web framework and to learn more about Python itself. Its no secret that I've been really interested in IronPython recently and I'm excited to give Python a go without the backing of the .NET framework (but with a complete standard library implementation, unlike IronPython).
For this post I basically just followed the installation guide and the first 4 tutorials in the excellent Django Documentation. Its not my intention to reproduce the tutorials in this post, I really just want to discuss things I found interesting while learning the framework.
Installing
After some fooling around I found the following versions of Python, Django and MySql were the easiest way to get started using Django on my Vista box. All of the versions below have windows installers so its pretty straight forward.
Python 2.5.4 (MySQL Python didn't have an installer for 2.6)
Django 1.0.2
MySql 5.0 (I had problems installing 5.1 on my Vista Box, so I reverted to 5.0 which just worked)
MySql Python Module
I deliberately didn't install the GUI tools for MySql as I wanted to get hardcore from the console. Djangos ORM can be used directly from the Python console and MySql has a complete command line interface.
Getting Started
Django comes with a helper script to assist setting up and managing a site. To do things like create a new web project all you need to do is run following command:
python django-admin.py startproject [sitename]
This creates the skeleton project structure and files.
.
..
manage.py
settings.py
urls.py
__init__.py
You can immediately validate everything is on the right track by running the development server.
python manage.py runserver
I was pretty excited I could just create a new database from the same console window
c:\Working>mysql -u root -p
Enter password: *******
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 2
Server version: 5.0.77-community-nt MySQL Community Edition (GPL)
Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.
mysql> CREATE DATABASE demodb;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.03 sec)
All I then needed to do was add my database credentials to the settings.py. Once this was setup I could use the syncdb command to build all the tables required by the framework (which includes an authorization module).
Which, without me doing anything else, creates the tables.
Creating table auth_permission
Creating table auth_group
Creating table auth_user
Creating table auth_message
Creating table django_content_type
Creating table django_session
Creating table django_site
Models
As with most MVC web application frameworks, there is a standard project structure convention. Django offers another command to quickly create an app, which is basically a small web application.
python manage.py startapp weblog
This creates a sub folder with the following files empty files
__init__.py
models.py
views.py
Then custom models can be added to the models python file. (Yes, I see that we probably would want more characters for a post, but I just want to get something going for now)
class Post(models.Model):
content = models.CharField(max_length=200)
pub_date = models.DateTimeField('date published')
class Comment(models.Model):
post = models.ForeignKey(Post)
comment = models.CharField(max_length=200)
To make the next bit of magic happen, we have to register this class in the main settings python file of this project.
INSTALLED_APPS = (
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.sessions',
'django.contrib.sites',
'DjangoSite.weblog',
)
Now the syncdb command can be used again to create the new tables for our model.
c:\Working\DjangoSite\DjangoSite>python manage.py syncdb
Creating table weblog_post
Creating table weblog_comment
Installing index for weblog.Comment model
We can now start checking out the ORM provided by Django in the interactive Python console.
>>> from DjangoSite.weblog.models import *
>>> import datetime
>>>
>>> post = Post(content = "Django Rocks!", pub_date=datetime.datetime.now())
>>> post.save()
>>>
>>> comment = Comment(post = post, comment="+1")
>>> comment.save()
>>>
>>> findPost = Post.objects.get(id=post.id)
>>> findPost.content
u'Django Rocks!'
>>>
>>> comments = findPost.comment_set.all()
>>> for c in comments:
... print c.comment
...
+1
>>> findPost.delete()
That's pretty cool, and just 6 lines of code to create the models!
Administration
A few lines need to be uncommented in the urls python file, another line added to the installed apps list and the new table needs to added to the database to enable the default administration features. For the mean time this will serve pages to manage user accounts, later we'll be able to use the administration features to create and a web administration interface for any of our models.
The urlpatterns object is pretty cool. Its basically the URL routing and it uses regular expressions to map requests to handler scripts. More on this before this post is finished.
from django.conf.urls.defaults import *
# Uncomment the next two lines to enable the admin:
from django.contrib import admin
admin.autodiscover()
urlpatterns = patterns('',
(r'^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root) ,
)
Now if we run the server admin pages can be found from /admin directory of the site.
I won't go into to much detail about how its done but by simply registering a model, web pages are provided to manage that model (finding, adding, deleting and updating). Its all very clever, the framework does lots of introspection to display the correct html controls for each field type.
To separate the UI from the model, a class can be created which is used to guide how the admin framework renders the pages for the model, it is then used to map fields to properties on the model object.
Views
Getting some weblog pages setup is amazingly straight forward. Its just a matter of adding a regular expression into the urlpatterns that matches the type of URL you want to handle and a function to handle it. The most basic handler method is what you'd expect, it takes a http request and returns a http response.
from django.http import HttpResponse
def index(request):
return HttpResponse("This is the posts page!")
This can be expanded to actually use the weblog models. The code below gets the 5 most recent posts and creates a string with each post content separated with a <br /> tag.
from DjangoSite.weblog.models import Post, Comment
from django.http import HttpResponse
def index(request):
lastestPosts = Post.objects.all().order_by('-pub_date')[:5]
output = '<br />'.join([p.content for p in lastestPosts])
return HttpResponse(output)
Well that's pretty cool, but I don't think we'll be writing entire pages using standard Python. Besides, these look more like controllers than views, there must be more to it.
Templates
With templates, we can throw objects at a template to be rendered. The index method can now be separated from the rendering of HTML
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from DjangoSite.weblog.models import Post, Comment
from django.http import HttpResponse
def index(request):
latestPosts = Post.objects.all().order_by('-pub_date')[:5]
return render_to_response('weblog/index.html', {'posts': latestPosts})
And the template (weblog/index.html) looks something like this
{% if posts %}
<ul>
{% for post in posts %}
<li>{{ post.content }}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% else %}
<p>There are no posts</p>
{% endif %}
It worth noting this isn't just Python embedded in HTML. I think this text from the Django documentation describes this design decision:
..you’ll want to bear in mind that the Django template system is not simply Python embedded into HTML. This is by design: the template system is meant to express presentation, not program logic
It makes sense to me.
Forms
A forms post data can be retrieved from a dictionary on the request object.
def index(request):
postTitle = resquest.POST["postTitle"]
...
I'm sure Django has support for mapping posts to model objects, but I haven't seen it yet.
Some more magic
It turns out there is heaps more support in Django for handling generic web problems. For example creating list and details pages is so common that Django has some generic functionality to help. You just need to provide a model and write some templates to describe how to render the models.
It appears there is heaps more of the magic throughout the framework some things I haven't yet looked into are:
Advanced form processing
Using the RSS framework
Using the cache framework
Using the comments framework
Summary
I've just stepped through all the basic steps to building a functional database driven web application. Overall I'm pretty impressed; it didn't take much time, code or leaps in faith to get it going. It appears to do generic things, like what I was doing, is even easier as the framework has generic support for it.
I am glad I got into it from the ground up, I think I would have been a lot more skeptical had I written a simple weblog without writing a line of Python. I've come to learn that its not about the 90% things that are easy to do in a web application framework, its about the 10% of things you want to do but don't work out of the box. Of course I haven't had enough exposure with Django to say how deep the application framework actually goes. I personally feel that Django and Python are a fantastic language and framework to deal with the 10% of requirements that don't come out of the box.
On anther note, I personally love coding from the console rather than an IDE, even with limited exposure I was getting pretty quick navigating my project, running the Django web development helpers and managing MySql. I personally think it's faster developing from a console with all your tools accessible without taking your hands of the keyboard.
Its been lots of fun playing with the framework. I'd definitely like to build a site in Django some time, but I'm not sure when I'll find the time.