Django- what why & how!

Sapna Kul

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7 min readDec 15, 2022

Everything you need to know before you start learning Django.

What is Django? 🤔

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development. It’s free and open source. Just like HTML, CSS, and JS, it is used to make web pages. But the fact is we can create more dynamic web pages using Django. It uses Model View Template(MVT)

Top features of Django framework:

1. Excellent Documentation 📃:

Django has been the best at documentation from the beginning, from the point it became open source in 2005 to the present date, and the documentation has only been getting better with the active development of technology and it is also offered in different languages.

2. Python Web framework 🐍:

Python is the easiest programming language out there. We can use this language in almost everything from web development (Django) to machine learning and everything in between.

3. SEO optimized 📑:

This is a special feature of Django due to which it has an edge over others. SEO is Search Engine Optimization as from the name it means that adding your website to the search engine such that it appears in the top results. Django clears that concept by maintaining the website through URLs rather than the IP addresses on the server, which makes it easy for SEO engineers to add the website to the server while the web developer doesn’t have to convert the URL into some numeric code.

4. High scalability:

A lot of MNCs on a worldwide scale use Django, and it gets implemented there without any defects or errors. It is the best example of Django being scalable. Django is written by experienced programmers from scratch without using any Python library existing other than what the developers created themselves. Thousands of tests and debugging and now with lots of time on the market side as the open-source project makes Django ideal for anyone who wants to make their websites error-free and scalable to a bigger environment.

5. Versatile in nature:

Django is very versatile in its own Django way. The logical project structure and MVT architecture of Django sometimes seem very limiting. But, that’s just the opposite because by giving us the files it is providing us with a solid foundation that can then be used to make whichever application we want to create.

All that with integration with almost all the technologies out there with upgrades is by fulfilling the industry standards.

It allows extending Django with all the technologies we work with and also with the upcoming ones. Therefore, Django is the future of web development and everyone who was previously using PHP will majorly use Django.

6. Offers High Security 🔐

Django is super secure. To prove the feature, you can always take examples of lots of websites that are worldwide and possess huge traffic.

Django is secure because it covers the loopholes by default that were once left open for the backend developer to complete. Although while using Django you may not feel it those expert backend developers can tell the quality and security of the work done by Django.

The writing of Django’s code is totally from scratch which accounts for its other features as well, but it also accounts for the security you are getting with this framework. We cannot get the security at such a huge scale with this much expertise level of code in other technologies.

It’s been written by web developers keeping in mind what problems are faced by the same and with that to get a rapid development speed.

7. Thoroughly Tested

Whenever we are learning a new technology, we want it to be durable and powerful enough to withstand the dynamic changes happening in the industry. Well, Django achieves that task with flying colors. We are trying to state that “Django has been in the industry for more than a decade and is still a popular technology which is beating frameworks like Laravel(PHP) in their own game.”

MNCs all over the world extensively use Django for creating projects so we can say that it works well to handle all the traffic and also accomplish international standards.

It’s been around for so much time that lots of bugs and errors have been taken care of. It is a good time to learn this technology. The number of developers using Django for web development keeps growing day by day. Thus, it makes Django a crowd-tested technology. If it was not stable or task accomplished why would it gain popularity and still be in the market.

8. Provides Rapid Development

Although lots of technologies cover this feature as the primary feature, Django has so many other better features that set it apart.

Here, rapid development means that we won’t need expert backend knowledge to make a fully functional website. We will also not create separate server files to design the database and connect the same while also making another file for transferring data to and from the server. Django handles this work and a lot of other tasks. We won’t need extra files for each task.

These tasks are like half the project time and money, and they are surely important for almost any website out there. While Django supports them inbuilt thus, allowing you to work more on your website’s unique feature.

We can handle many complex tasks with the help of Django Features mentioned above.

History :

Django was created 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. Jacob Kaplan-Moss was hired early in Django’s development shortly before Simon Willison’s internship ended. It was released publicly under a BSD license in July 2005. The framework was named after guitarist Django Reinhardt. Adrian Holovaty is a Romani jazz guitar player and a big fan of Django Reinhardt.

What you can do with Django Framework?

You can create a powerful web application using Django. Companies like Instagram, Udemy, Pinterest, etc use Django.

Is it beginner-friendly?

Yes. It has many things in-built. You can simply use it for your work without doing a lot of programming. It is easy for beginners and an effective tool for masters. It is basically written in Python itself so if you know the basics of Python you can easily grasp this one.

Django is Client-side(frontend) or Server-side(backend):

Django is a framework, not a language. Python is the language in which Django is written.

Django is a collection of Python libs allowing you to quickly and efficiently create a quality Web application and is suitable for both frontend and backend.

However, Django is pretty famous for its “Django admin”, an auto-generated backend that allows you to manage your website in a blink for a lot of simple use cases without having to code much.

More precisely, for the front end, Django helps you with data selection, formatting, and display. It features URL management, a templating language, authentication mechanisms, cache hooks, and various navigation tools such as paginators.

For the backend, Django comes with an ORM that lets you manipulate your data source with ease, forms (an HTML independent implementation) to process user input and validate data and signals, and implementation of the observer pattern. Plus a ton of use-case-specific nifty little tools.

For the rest of the backend work, Django doesn’t help, you just use regular Python. Business logic is a pretty broad term.

You probably want to know as well that Django comes with the concept of apps, a self-contained pluggable Django library that solves a problem. The Django community is huge, and so there are numerous apps that do specific business logic that vanilla Django doesn’t.

Comparing Django with HTML,CSS,JS:

It can do more than that, but that is the basics of it. Writing HTML code by hand is very tedious, not very efficient, and limited: you can’t make pages that adapt to the person who asks for it such as a user page or a search page.

Django is a tool that can understand what a user is asking, and create the HTML code in a fraction of a second, then send it back. When you see a Website such as Google or Amazon, they are using such a tool to display what you search for (although they don’t use Django, there are many similar tools to do so).

If you want to learn to make Websites with Django, you probably want to learn things in that order :