A very basic question with Django

[Sarbjit singh]

First of all, I am very sorry for asking this basic question. I am not sure if this is the right place to put this question but I am very confused.

I am not having much experience with web development, so i don't know where the Django fits in here. I searched a lot on internet, few forums suggested to use Django for websites and few mentioned that Django is not for web development. So i have couple of basic questions and i want to be sure that i am on right track in learning Django.

Q: There are simple websites which just serves static contents and other site which deals with forms and data base. I have once used PHP for form processing and using it with DB. If i have to design such websites using Python, Is Django suitable for the following or there are some other modules which needs to be used.

Q: Is Django a substitute to CGI for dynamic web generation.

Q: Can i use Django for development of a full fledged website.

[Tomáš Ehrlich]

Hello,

I wouldn't say that Django is not suitable for web development. Even when someone says it's not, it's just an opinion, but in general, Django is framework for web development.

A1: Django has many batteries included. Database access through object relational model and form processing are just two parts from whole bunch. Checkout the documentation for latest stable version of Django https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/

A2: I admit that I don't know exactly what CGI means, but you actually can deploy Django using FastCGI. I'm using WSGI, which is recommended method right now. Please checkout documentation for more details https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/howto/deployment/fastcgi/

A3: I believe you can. Do you know pinterest.com, disgus.com, instagram.com? They're all written in Django. Please checkout the homepage of Djangoproject for more https://www.djangoproject.com/ (column Sites using django) or directly http://www.djangosites.com. Some of these sites have source code available.

My conclusion is: Django is suitable for web development. It's a great project with perfect documentation and community. Checkout the tutorial, it's really helpful https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/intro/tutorial01/

Cheers,

 Tom

Dne středa, 10. října 2012 7:24:26 UTC+2 Sarbjit singh napsal(a):

[Tomáš Ehrlich]

Ehm, It's not disgus but http://www.disqus.com ;) Sorry...

Dne středa, 10. října 2012 8:09:07 UTC+2 Tomáš Ehrlich napsal(a):

[Tim Chase]

On 10/10/12 01:09, Tomáš Ehrlich wrote:
>> A2: I admit that I don't know exactly what CGI means, but you
>> actually can deploy Django using FastCGI. I'm using WSGI,
>> which is recommended method right now. Please checkout
>> documentation for more details
>> https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/howto/deployment/fastcgi/

CGI is an old-school way of launching web-processing apps. It spins
up the entire environment on every request. Normally with WSGI or
FastCGI, the Django process is spun up once and proceeds to handle
multiple requests. So with CGI, you get much slower response times.

I do remember seeing a "run Django as CGI" patch or module, but it
came with the harsh and explicit warning not to use it in the real
world (where response time and load actually have any sort of
meaning). It might suffice to deploy on a $3/month host that only
offers CGI, and your site is intended for personal/family use only.
Otherwise, not a viable option.

-tkc

[shmengie]

Django is suited well for developing interactive web applications.  It provides comprehensive framework with "batteries included."  That means once you learn the framework, common and repetitive development tasks are simpler.

Being a framework, means your going to need to learn it's scaffolding.  The django team has created good documentation, which makes it fairly easy to learn and quite usable.

Django is built with Python and uses a lot of Python methodology.  I like Python a lot, so that makes it very well suited for me. 

There are several different frameworks, some in Python, some in PHP, etc...  None are very simple, because managing states, with stateless web browsers is not a simple feat.  Whichever you choose, will likely require a substantial time/learning investment. 

If you need to develop complex web application, a framework may reduce development time from years to months.  Once you're familiar with the framework, the work can be reduced from weeks to days/hours.  

If you need to develop a static web site with an e-mail form, PHP may be better suited for the solution.  PHP can do a lot more than that by itself, but it quickly becomes difficult to maintain, especially if the task is complicated or your application is dynamic.

Frameworks provide a consistent way of repeating tasks.  Django is the best, IMO.

get started: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/

[Kurtis Mullins]

1. Django is perfectly suitable for handling Forms and content stored in a database. In a low to medium traffic site, serving static content is not a problem at all. In fact, that's the purpose of a Content Management System. Many of which have been built on or around Django. If you get to a point where your site is hitting an insane amount of traffic (unlikely, statistsically speaking), there is at least one project which will take your Django pages and turn them into static HTML so you can serve them outside of Django using a very fast web server.

2. As others have said, CGI is simply one method (technically, an interface standard) to dynamically generate content to be served by Web Servers. Django would not be a substitute because Django is a Framework for building Web Applications and CGI is an interface for serving content. However, Django could be compared to a CGI Application and in that case it would, basically, be a substitute.

3. Absolutely. Many web sites are built on Django. That's actually the entire purpose behind it :)

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[Tomas Ehrlich]

Common guys, this thread isn't about me and CGI :) I really don't care
what it is and know, when you've just told me what it is I don't care
even more :)

If you know what's CGI, feel free to answer the original question:
"Could Django be deployed using CGI?"

Cheers,
Tom :)

Dne Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:11:39 -0400
Dennis Lee Bieber <wlf...@ix.netcom.com> napsal(a):

> On Tue, 9 Oct 2012 23:09:07 -0700 (PDT), Tomáš Ehrlich
> <tomas....@gmail.com> declaimed the following in
> gmane.comp.python.django.user:

>
> > Hello,
> > I wouldn't say that Django is not suitable for web development. Even when
> > someone says it's not, it's just an opinion, but in general, Django is
> > framework for web development.
> >

> In a way, Django is not useful for anything except web development
> <G>
>
> It's probably not the most suited for a site with 90% of the pages
> static information, being optimized to link pages through to
> live/dynamic database information.

>
> >
> > A2: I admit that I don't know exactly what CGI means, but you actually can
>

> Common Gateway Interface: Typically it meant running a whole
> program/script for each request. The start-up time for the Python
> interpreter itself makes pure CGI costly.

>
> > deploy Django using FastCGI. I'm using WSGI, which is recommended method
> > right now. Please checkout documentation for more
> > details https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/howto/deployment/fastcgi/
>

> FastCGI, mod_python, and WSGI all, as I understand them, attempt to
> keep the interpreter and script loaded in a form that allows the server
> to "call" into the application script, rather than start a process from
> scratch.
>



S pozdravem
Tomáš Ehrlich

Email: tomas....@gmail.com
Tel: +420 608 219 889
Jabber: elv...@jabber.cz

"Půjdu kamkoliv, pokud je to kupředu." - J. London

[Kurtis Mullins]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 2:29 PM, Tomas Ehrlich <tomas....@gmail.com> wrote:

Common guys, this thread isn't about me and CGI :) I really don't care
what it is and know, when you've just told me what it is I don't care
even more :)

If you know what's CGI, feel free to answer the original question:
"Could Django be deployed using CGI?"

Cheers,
 Tom :)

I'm not sure when/where you asked that question. It looked like this thread was started by Sarbjit who asked three different questions.

To answer your question: Yes, it's possible. 

[Tim Chase]

On 10/10/12 13:29, Tomas Ehrlich wrote:
> If you know what's CGI, feel free to answer the original question:
> "Could Django be deployed using CGI?"

Yes, it can be done[1]. No, it's not usually a good idea.

-tkc


[1]
http://joemaller.com/1467/django-via-cgi-on-shared-hosting/
https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/2407
https://www.google.com/search?q=deploy+django+cgi

[Peter Murphy]

On Wednesday, October 10, 2012 3:24:26 PM UTC+10, Sarbjit singh wrote:

First of all, I am very sorry for asking this basic question. I am not sure if this is the right place to put this question but I am very confused.

Hello, Sarbjit.

 

I am not having much experience with web development, so i don't know where the Django fits in here. I searched a lot on internet, few forums suggested to use Django for websites and few mentioned that Django is not for web development. So i have couple of basic questions and i want to be sure that i am on right track in learning Django.

Be careful of forums. On some places, it's the "blind leading the blind".

"Where does Django fit in"? It fits in on the server machine. A HTTP server program (like Apache or nginx) takes web page requests, and passes them onto Django. In turn, Django interprets the requests, generally running queries on the database and doing whatever processing is necessary to generate a web page. Django then throws the generated web page to the HTTP server, which then sends it back to the web browser.

Django has a development server where you can request and receive pages without something like Apache or nginx. But this is not recommended in a production environment, because it is a lot slower. Django is used for generating content dynamically; but there is no gain in using development server to fetch static files (like images).
 

Q: There are simple websites which just serves static contents and other site which deals with forms and data base. I have once used PHP for form processing and using it with DB. If i have to design such websites using Python, Is Django suitable for the following or there are some other modules which needs to be used.

If everything is static, then Django is overkill. All you need is your favorite HTTP server. But if you are dealing with forms and databases, then Django is very, very suitable indeed. There are classes in the framework that allow you to create forms on the fly. As for databases, there are also classes that allow you to model the database tables and run queries _without writing any SQL_.  Do you really want to write your own SQL statements? I don't.

You asked "are there some other modules which needs to be used?" Well, you need Python to run it; Django won't work without it. But other "modules" you may need are modules written in Python - and they can be installed as simply as running "pip install <module-name>" from the command line.

One of the best things about Django is that a lot of security is built in by default. You can write something and be fairly confident that all the attack vectors have been blocked off. SQL injections? Not a problem; the model classes do all the hard work of passing queries to the database and _escaping content_.  Cross Site Request Forgeries? The form classes prevent such things occurring.

 

Q: Is Django a substitute to CGI for dynamic web generation.

It sounds better than bog standard CGI, where every request spawns a new process. 


 

Q: Can i use Django for development of a full fledged website.

Of course you can.
 
Best regards,
Peter

[Sarbjit singh]

Thanks Guys for your valuable answers. As you have pointed out that learning Framework would take time, so i just wanted to be sure that my investment would be worth full. I am learning Python & Django as a hobby but my aim is to make some website dealing with forms and database. So in conclusion, It would be worth spending time on Django.

- Sarbjit