Django is a high-level Python web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Django makes it easier to build better web apps quickly and with less code.

Django – Design Philosophies

Django comes with the following design philosophies

• Loosely Coupled

  Django aims to make each element of its stack independent of the others.

• Less Coding 

  Less code so in turn a quick development.

• Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) 

  Django aims to make each element of its stack independent of the others.

• Fast Development

  Django's philosophy is to do all it can to facilitate hyper-fast development.

• Clean Design

  Django strictly maintains a clean design throughout its own code and makes it easy to follow best web-development practices.

Overview

As you already know, Django is a Python web framework. And like most modern framework, Django supports the MVC pattern. First let's see what is the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, and then we will look at Django’s specificity for the Model-View-Template (MVT) pattern.

MVC Pattern

When talking about applications that provides UI (web or desktop), we usually talk about MVC architecture. And as the name suggests, MVC pattern is based on three components: Model, View, and Controller. Check our MVC tutorial here to know more.

DJANGO MVC - MVT Pattern

The Model-View-Template (MVT) is slightly different from MVC. In fact the main difference between the two patterns is that Django itself takes care of the Controller part (Software Code that controls the interactions between the Model and View), leaving us with the template. The template is a HTML file mixed with Django Template Language (DTL).

Creating Views

A view function, or “view” for short, is simply a Python function that takes a web request and returns a web response. This response can be the HTML contents of a Web page, or a redirect, or a 404 error, or an XML document, or an image, etc. Example: You use view to create web pages, note that you need to associate a view to a URL to see it as a web page.

In Django, views have to be created in the app views.py file.

Simple view

We will create a simple view in myapp to say "welcome to my app!"

Snippet here

from django.http import HttpResponse
def hello(request):
text = """

welcome to my app !

"""
return HttpResponse(text)

In this view, we use HttpResponse to render the HTML (as you have probably noticed we have the HTML hard coded in the view). To see this view as a page we just need to map it to a URL (this will be discussed in an upcoming chapter).

We used HttpResponse to render the HTML in the view before. This is not the best way to render pages. Django supports the MVT pattern so to make the precedent view, Django - MVT like, we will need −

A template: myapp/templates/hello.html

from django.shortcuts import render
def hello(request):
return render(request, "myapp/template/hello.html", {})

Views can also accept parameters −

from django.http import HttpResponse
def hello(request, number):
text = "welcome to my app number %s!"% number
return HttpResponse(text)