#483 Django Design Patterns and Best Practices

Book Notes - Django Design Patterns and Best Practices, by Arun Ravindran. First published March 1, 2015. 4th Edition 2011.

Notes

Contents

• Chapter 1: Django and Patterns
  • Why Django?
  • The story of Django
    • A framework is born
    • Removing the magic
    • Django keeps getting better
    • How does Django work?
  • What is a Pattern?
    • Gang of Four Patterns
    • Is Django MVC?
    • Fowler’s Patterns
    • Are there more patterns?
  • Patterns in this book
    • Criticism of Patterns
    • How to use Patterns
  • Best practices
    • Python Zen and Django’s design philosophy
  • Summary
• Chapter 2: Application Design
  • How to gather requirements
  • Are you a story teller?
  • HTML mockups
  • Designing the application
    • Dividing a project into Apps
    • Reuse or roll-your-own?
      • My app sandbox
    • Which packages made it?
  • Before starting the project
  • SuperBook - your mission, should you choose to accept it
    • Why Python 3?
    • Starting the project
  • Summary
• Chapter 3: Models
  • M is bigger than V and C
  • The model hunt
    • Splitting models.py into multiple files
  • Structural patterns
    • Patterns - normalized models
    • Pattern - model mixins
    • Pattern - user profiles
    • Pattern - service objects
  • Retrieval patterns
    • Pattern - property field
    • Pattern - custom model managers
  • Migrations
  • Summary
• Chapter 4: Views and URLs
  • A view from the top
    • Views got classier
  • Class-based generic views
  • View mixins
    • Order of mixins
  • Decorators
  • View patterns
    • Pattern - access controlled views
    • Pattern - context enhancers
    • Pattern - services
  • Designing URLs
    • URL anatomy
    • What happens in urls.py?
    • The URL pattern syntax
    • Names and namespaces
    • Pattern order
    • URL pattern styles
  • Summary
• Chapter 5: Templates
  • Understanding Django’s template language features
    • Variables
    • Attributes
    • Filters
    • Tags
    • Philosophy - don’t invent a programming language
  • Organizing templates
    • Support for other template languages
  • Using Bootstrap
    • But they all look the same!
  • Template patterns
    • Pattern - template inheritance tree
    • Pattern - the active link
  • Summary
• Chapter 6: Admin Interface
  • Using the admin interface
  • Enhancing models for the admin
    • Not everyone should be an admin
  • Admin interface customizations
    • Changing the heading
    • Changing the base and stylesheets
    • Adding a Rich Text Editor for WYSIWYG editing
    • Bootstrap-themed admin
    • Complete overhauls
    • Protecting the admin
    • Pattern - feature flags
  • Summary
• Chapter 7: Forms
  • How forms work
    • Forms in Django
    • Why does data need cleaning?
  • Displaying forms Time to be crisp
  • Understanding CSRF
  • Form processing with Class-based views
  • Form patterns
    • Pattern - dynamic form generation
    • Pattern - user-based forms
    • Pattern - multiple form actions per view
    • Pattern - CRUD views
  • Summary
• Chapter 8: Dealing with Legacy Code
  • Finding the Django version
    • Activating the virtual environment
  • Where are the files? This is not PHP
  • Starting with urls.py
  • Jumping around the code
  • Understanding the code base
    • Creating the big picture
  • Incremental change or a full rewrite?
  • Write tests before making any changes
    • Step-by-step process to writing tests
  • Legacy databases
  • Summary
• Chapter 9: Testing and Debugging
  • Why write tests?
  • Test-driven development
  • Writing a test case
    • The assert method
    • Writing better test cases
  • Mocking
  • Pattern - test fixtures and factories
    • Problem details
    • Solution details
  • Learning more about testing
  • Debugging
    • Django debug page
    • A better debug page
  • The print function
  • Logging
  • The Django Debug Toolbar
  • The Python debugger pdb
  • Other Debuggers
  • Debugging django templates
  • Summary
• Chapter 10: Security
  • Cross-site scripting (XSS)
    • Why are your cookies valuable?
      • How Django helps
      • Where Django might not help
    • Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
      • How Django helps
      • Where Django might not help
    • SQL injection
      • How Django helps
      • Where Django might not help
    • Clickjacking
      • How Django helps
    • Shell injection
      • How Django helps
    • And the list goes on
  • A handy security checklist
  • Summary
• Chapter 11: Production-ready
  • Production environment
    • Choosing a web stack
    • Components of a stack
  • Hosting
    • Platform as a service
    • Virtual private servers
    • Other hosting approaches
  • Deployment tools
    • Fabric
    • Typical deployment steps
    • Configuration management
  • Monitoring
  • Performance
    • Frontend performance
    • Backend performance
      • Templates
      • Database
      • Caching
  • Summary
• Appendix: Python 2 versus Python 3
  • But I still use Python 2.7!
  • Python 3
    • Python 3 for Djangonauts
    • Change all the unicode methods into str
    • All classes inherit from the object class
    • Calling super() is easier
    • Relative imports must be explicit
    • HttpRequest and HttpResponse have str and bytes types
    • Exception syntax changes and improvements
    • Standard library reorganized
    • New goodies
      • Using Pyvenv and Pip
    • Other changes
  • Further information
• Index

Getting the Example Source

git clone https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/9781783986644/ example_source

Credits and References

• Django Design Patterns and Best Practices
  • amazon
  • O’Reilly
  • goodreads
  • examples
• Django Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition
  • O’Reilly