Django was initially developed between and by a web team who were responsible for creating and maintaining newspaper websites. After creating a number of sites, the team began to factor out and reuse lots of common code and design patterns. This common code evolved into a generic web development framework, which was open-sourced as the "Django" project in July Django has continued to grow and improve, from its first milestone release 1.
Each release has added new functionality and bug fixes, ranging from support for new types of databases, template engines, and caching, through to the addition of "generic" view functions and classes which reduce the amount of code that developers have to write for a number of programming tasks. Note: Check out the release notes on the Django website to see what has changed in recent versions, and how much work is going into making Django better. Django is now a thriving, collaborative open source project, with many thousands of users and contributors.
While it does still have some features that reflect its origin, Django has evolved into a versatile framework that is capable of developing any type of website. There isn't any readily-available and definitive measurement of popularity of server-side frameworks although you can estimate popularity using mechanisms like counting the number of GitHub projects and StackOverflow questions for each platform.
A better question is whether Django is "popular enough" to avoid the problems of unpopular platforms. Is it continuing to evolve?
Can you get help if you need it? Is there an opportunity for you to get paid work if you learn Django? Based on the number of high profile sites that use Django, the number of people contributing to the codebase, and the number of people providing both free and paid for support, then yes, Django is a popular framework! Opinionated frameworks are those with opinions about the "right way" to handle any particular task.
They often support rapid development in a particular domain solving problems of a particular type because the right way to do anything is usually well-understood and well-documented. However they can be less flexible at solving problems outside their main domain, and tend to offer fewer choices for what components and approaches they can use. Unopinionated frameworks, by contrast, have far fewer restrictions on the best way to glue components together to achieve a goal, or even what components should be used.
They make it easier for developers to use the most suitable tools to complete a particular task, albeit at the cost that you need to find those components yourself. Django is "somewhat opinionated", and hence delivers the "best of both worlds". It provides a set of components to handle most web development tasks and one or two preferred ways to use them. However, Django's decoupled architecture means that you can usually pick and choose from a number of different options, or add support for completely new ones if desired.
In a traditional data-driven website, a web application waits for HTTP requests from the web browser or other client. Depending on what is required it may then read or write information from a database or perform other tasks required to satisfy the request. The application will then return a response to the web browser, often dynamically creating an HTML page for the browser to display by inserting the retrieved data into placeholders in an HTML template. Django web applications typically group the code that handles each of these steps into separate files:.
It has many similarities to the more familiar Model View Controller architecture. The sections below will give you an idea of what these main parts of a Django app look like we'll go into more detail later on in the course, once we've set up a development environment. A URL mapper is typically stored in a file named urls. In the example below, the mapper urlpatterns defines a list of mappings between routes specific URL patterns and corresponding view functions.
For example: [item1, item2, item3,]. The first argument to both methods is a route pattern that will be matched. The path method uses angle brackets to define parts of a URL that will be captured and passed through to the view function as named arguments.
We'll talk about these in a later article! The second argument is another function that will be called when the pattern is matched. The notation views. In between, they marshal the other resources of the framework to access databases, render templates, etc. The example below shows a minimal view function index , which could have been called by our URL mapper in the previous section. Like all view functions it receives an HttpRequest object as a parameter request and returns an HttpResponse object.
In this case we don't do anything with the request, and our response returns a hard-coded string. We'll show you a request that does something more interesting in a later section. Django web applications manage and query data through Python objects referred to as models. Models define the structure of stored data, including the field types and possibly also their maximum size, default values, selection list options, help text for documentation, label text for forms, etc.
The definition of the model is independent of the underlying database — you can choose one of several as part of your project settings. This all makes Django a very suitable choice when cybersecurity is a top priority. Another area in which Django is used for by many developers is scalability.
At its core, Django is just a series of components of Python, wired up and ready to go. You can pick and choose, unplug and replace them as and when your site requires. This means you can build it up to whatever level of performance you need your site to be capable of, at any time, without compromising the functionality of the website. Django is not necessarily the best framework to use in every instance.
Its heavy, monolithic structure can be a hindrance for developers looking for highly customisable, quicker apps, such as a short script. The strengths of Django lay in its reliable, efficient, architecturally sound, secure nature when building apps on the larger side. We hope we answered your question what is Django used for. Take advantage of Django structured nature and use it to build long-term projects where efficiency of code, data management and security , and an organised system that can scale well over time are your main priorities.
If you need a lighter framework better suited to the short-term, it might be best to look elsewhere. Wiktor Gonczaronek. Szymon Miks. Piotr Czajka. John Waldron. Skip navigation Logo of Netguru. What is Django? Django is time- and crowd-tested. It has a big, supportive community accessed through numerous forums, channels, and dedicated websites.
Django started off with great documentation, the best of any other open-source framework. You can trust that any issues with the framework will be solved as soon as they arise.
The software is constantly updated and new packages are released to make working with Django more convenient than it already is. You can expect it to be amazing at handling projects with volumes of text content, media files, and heavy traffic — or anything else that works like a web-based periodical.
Django is also used to build eCommerce websites and health care and financial applications for transportation and booking, social media sites, and more. Here are some of the many project types you can develop using the framework:. Some companies choose to base their projects on more than one framework. Django can also be used to create separate features, such as:. Django is a great addition to projects that need to handle large volumes of content e. Yet it is simple enough for smaller-scale projects, or if you intend to scale your project to a much higher level.
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