Intro to Django
LINKS
Getting started with Django
Models
A model is the single, definitive source of information about your data. It contains the essential fields and behaviors of the data you’re storing. Generally, each model maps to a single database table.
The basics:
- Each model is a Python class that subclasses django.db.models.Model.
- Each attribute of the model represents a database field.
- With all of this, Django gives you an automatically-generated database-access API; see Making queries.
from django.db import models
class Person(models.Model):
first_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
last_name = models.CharField(max_length=30)
How Django Works Behind the Scenes
Django is a Python-based web framework used by millions of developers and billions of consumers through popular apps like Instagram. It is open source, meaning the code is available for free on Github and can be downloaded onto any developer’s computer and used alongside the official documentation. However, I find that even professional Django developers have little insight into “how” Django is actually run, both technically and legally/financially, so this post is my attempt to provide a concise overview of it all.
Django was originally developed at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper by Adrian Holovaty, Simon Willison, and Jacob Kaplan-Moss. The code was open-sourced in 2005 and developers immediately started making contributions to the codebase. Fourteen years later, Django remains under active development, with new major releases every nine months, minor security releases almost monthly, an official issue tracker, and robust discussion on the django-developers Google group.
As with all open source projects, the two major issues that crop up are funding and control. Let’s start with funding: why does an open-source project need funding?
It turns out that while writing code is fun and developers are generally willing to contribute their time for free to do so, there are a host of decidedly less fun tasks needed to maintain and sustain an open source project. This includes handling any legal/trademark issues, triaging tickets, guiding community discussions, organizing conferences, managing releases, and so on. As a result, almost all popular open source packages have some degree of funding involved, typically in one of three forms: