Django is a high-level Python web framework that enables rapid development of secure and maintainable websites. Built by experienced developers, Django takes care of much of the hassle of web development, so you can focus on writing your app without needing to reinvent the wheel. It is free and open source, has a thriving and active community, great documentation, and many options for free and paid-for support.
Django helps you write software that is:
- Complete - Provides almost everything developers might want to do "out of the box"
- Versatile - Can be used to build any type of website - from content management systems and wikis, through to social networks and news sites
- Secure - helps developers avoid many common security mistakes by providing a framework that has been engineered to "do the right things" to protect the website automatically
- Scalable - it can scale for increased traffic by adding hardware at any level: caching servers, database servers, or application servers. Some of the busiest sites have successfully scaled Django to meet their demands (e.g. Instagram and Disqus, to name just two)
- Maintainable - it makes use of the Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle so there is no unnecessary duplication, reducing the amount of code.
- Portable - Django is written in Python, which runs on many platforms.
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)
High-profile sites that use Django include: Disqus, Instagram, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla, National Geographic, Open Knowledge Foundation, Pinterest, and Open Stack (source: Django overview page).
Working flow of Django
Django web applications typically group the code that handles each of these steps into separate files:
- URLs: While it is possible to process requests from every single URL via a single function, it is much more maintainable to write a separate view function to handle each resource. A URL mapper is used to redirect HTTP requests to the appropriate view based on the request URL. The URL mapper can also match particular patterns of strings or digits that appear in a URL and pass these to a view function as data.
- View: A view is a request handler function, which receives HTTP requests and returns HTTP responses. Views access the data needed to satisfy requests via models, and delegate the formatting of the response to templates.
- Models: Models are Python objects that define the structure of an application's data, and provide mechanisms to manage (add, modify, delete) and query records in the database.
- Templates: A template is a text file defining the structure or layout of a file (such as an HTML page), with placeholders used to represent actual content. A view can dynamically create an HTML page using an HTML template, populating it with data from a model. A template can be used to define the structure of any type of file; it doesn't have to be HTML
Now that was a gist about the Django framework. To learn more you can visit its official documentation
To learn How to Install Django, you can visit my previous blog.