The explosion of the Web in the late 1990s sparked a major evolution in the core operation of businesses everywhere. The impact initially seemed minor, as the Web was made up of very simple sites that were time consuming to create and offered limited functionality. But the eventual success of new companies such as Amazon.com and eBay demonstrated that buying and selling online was not only possible, but revolutionary.
This book will explore how the Django web framework, and its related technologies, can power the next leap forward for e-commerce and business on the Web. As a tool, Django is like a power drill: it's fast, efficient, and full of momentum. It represents a major competitive advantage over previous development platforms. Along with competing frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, it heralds a new era for web development and the Internet as a whole.
This chapter will explore what makes Django so unique. Here we will:
- Discuss the pros and cons of Django as an e-commerce platform
- Learn to leverage Django's strengths to build powerful applications quickly
- Explore core concepts such as Django's approach to application and project layout
- Begin configuring our sample e-commerce project to be extended throughout the book
An emerging trend in recent years has been the arrival of powerful new web development frameworks, of which Django is a premier example. These frameworks are designed to build content-rich websites quickly and easily. They have different individual philosophies, but all seek to solve one main problemâsimplifying the repetitive and time-consuming development tasks that all websites and applications demand.
Solving this problem achieves two things:
- First, it radically alters the time and resources required to build web applications. Previous generations of development tools were either not designed specifically for the Web or were created during a different era with different needs. This new class of development tools is built specifically for today's applications and software schedules.
- The second benefit is quality. As the most basic and repetitive tasks are handled by the framework, developers can focus on adding value by building higher quality core application features and even advanced functionality that would previously be lost due to time or budget constraints. In many cases it also allows for a simplified division of labor; designers can focus on designing HTML templates, content producers can write content, and programmers can build software. When each team can focus exclusively on their task, with minimal interruption from the others, quality tends to increase.
Django is specifically designed to optimize for these characteristics. One unofficial motto is "don't repeat yourself". This means, do not reproduce the wheel, instead focus on the unique aspects of your application that provide new and profitable functionality.