Ace Your Web Development Career With Django Framework

The thousand-mile journey of building a web-based application begins with deciding what tech stack to use. There are multiple web frameworks available on the market, each designed to address different project needs. Before diving into why Django is one of the most versatile frameworks, let’s explore why it is a bad idea to stick to one framework:

“A carpenter doesn’t build furniture because they want to use a hammer, they use a hammer because they want to build furniture.”

Developers’ primary motive should be building applications as per customer and market needs — not using any programming language or framework. That being said, let’s jump in and see why we should consider Django in 2020.

Django is based on Python which is easy to use, powerful, and versatile, making it a great choice for beginners and experts alike. It allows you to think like a programmer and not waste time with confusing syntax. Once you build one or two applications using Django, you will love it. Not convinced? Let’s dig deeper!

Rapid Development

Django was created in a fast-paced environment to meet tight newsroom deadlines while satisfying the tough requirements of experienced Web developers. With Django, you can take the concept of a web application to its launch in a matter of hours! It’s learning curve is shallow-it is as easy as getting started with its programming language i.e. Python. Now let’s discuss how exactly Django helps in fast development.

Fully Loaded

Django provides many out of the box extras which you can use for common web development tasks. Let’s quickly go through some of the extras Django provides:

Object-Relational Mapper

The data-model syntax offers many rich ways of representing your models and it is as easy as writing classes. Here is a quick example of designing your model:

Making Queries

Once you’ve created your data models, Django automatically gives you a database-abstraction API that lets you create, retrieve, update, and delete objects. Here is how to retrieve all the objects of the Article model we created above.

Admin Interface

While creating a site, you don’t need to worry about managing your content. Once you register your model with one-liner code:

It takes care of backend CRUD and other functionalities. Moreover, the admin has many hooks for customization but beware of trying to use those hooks exclusively.

Django Templates

Django templates are used as a way of producing static HTML from the output of a Django view. Django offers powerful template language which offers extensive customizability. Other benefits include, but are not limited to, inheritance, URLnamespacing, and handling querysets.

This framework also takes care of user authentication, content administration, site maps, RSS feeds, and many more tasks — right out of the box. The most critical factor when choosing a framework is security. Let’s be honest! it should not be the job of a developer to worry about every possible vulnerability, right?

Most Secure Framework

Django is as secure as any web framework can be. It provides tools and doc to prevent common mistakes causing security problems.

Although a tool in itself cannot be “secure”. The whole platform security depends on the proper use of the tools you choose and thus is more a matter of developer skills. Now let’s go over some security features which Django provides to help developers avoid common security mistakes.

Cross-site scripting (XSS) protection: Using Django templates protects you against the majority of XSS attacks by escaping specific characters that are particularly dangerous to HTML.
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection: Django offers built-in protection against most types of CSRF attacks. It is also easy-to-implement.
SQL injection protection: By using query parameterization, Django’s querysets are protected from SQL injection.
Clickjacking protection: Django contains X-Frame-Options middleware which can prevent a site from being rendered inside a frame in a supporting browser.
Other Security Metrics: The security features also offer Host Header Validation, Session Security, Referrer-Policy, and HTTPS/SSL deployment, etc.

Scalable, Versatile, Open Source

Django is under a 3-clause BSD open-source license granting broad permissions to modify and redistribute it. It has a great open source community with loads of technical support. Django has the best documentation of any software project I can think of, period. It is thorough, cross-referenced, easy to read, versioned, well-presented, explains its weaknesses as well as its strengths.

Django is designed to take advantage of as much hardware as you can throw at it as it is stateless “shared-nothing” web architecture. Being able to do this is the essence of good scalability. With its ridiculous speed, companies, organizations, and governments have used Django to build all sorts of things — from content management systems to social networks to scientific computing platforms. Many great websites are built on Django including:

Instagram
Pinterest
Mozilla
BitBucket
Disqus

Motivation

What good is any framework if we can’t take the benefits from it? I have seen many aspiring programmers asking on how to get started on Django with cloud services implementation as well as front-end framework while they have experience in none.

My advice: start slow, start positive! If you want to start your career in web development then Django Official Tutorial is the best place to go. Explore more topics of Django and make the best use of them in your projects. By doing this, your Github profile will also get decorated with the projects. Just take a deep breath and start developing!

Each step you take reveals a new horizon. You have taken the first step today. Now, I challenge you to take another.

Don’t be a Jack of all trades, master of none. Start taking steps towards learning. You won’t regret it, I promise! Here is a sweet range of salaries of python developers:

Conclusion

With the ever-growing community of developers, and 240,000+ Python packages on PyPI. With companies like NASA, the Django framework is not going anywhere any soon. With multiple open source contributions every day, it’s demand is only going to increase 🚀 in the software industry.

Resources

Liked this article? Share it with your fellows and create a productive environment around yourself. If you have any queries, drop them in the response and I would do best to answer them.

Till we meet again!