What Is a Web Framework?

Every Web application is a masterpiece handcrafted by a developer. While developing web apps often we need to perform a similar set of most common operations like routing, user authentication, handling files and many more.

This is where web frameworks come handy, A web framework is a set of such common modules so that developers can focus more on writing the app than reinventing the wheel which makes web development faster.

Frameworks are built to support the construction of web applications based on a single programming language, there are many web frameworks written purely on Python, despite the competition Django has emerged as the most powerful and loved frameworks of all time.

Web frameworks like Django speed up the development process with all the necessary features baked in. Frameworks automate the most common tasks such as database administration, user management, and routing which increases the productivity of developers.

Introduction To Django

Django is a high level full stack open source web framework written in Python, that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Django is the go-to framework for any project irrespective of size, from a basic blog to a full-fledged social media app. Python gaining immense growth over the last couple of decades have a positive impact on the growth of Django many major firms are now recruiting Django specialists for their projects.

The Django framework started in 2003, as a project done by Adrian Holovaty and Simon Willison at the Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, in the United States. In 2005, Holovaty and Willison released the first public version of the framework, naming it after the Belgian-French guitarist Django Reinhardt.

In 2008, the Django Software Foundation ( DSF ) was founded to support and advance Django, a few months later version 1.00 of the framework was released under the BSD license. At the moment Django core has over 1000  active contributors and over 4000 packages specifically written for Django.

Django was compatible only with Python 2.x until 2013, the release of Django 1.5 on February 26, 2013 started moving towards Python 3.x which was clearly the future of Python. After the release of Django 2.0 on December 2017, Django was strictly for Python 3.x.

The reason for the insane popularity of Django is its simplicity. Django strive to provides more by doing less, therefore it's cited as, " The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines".

Django comes with a number of goodies out of the box such as admin interface, optimized and powerful ORM, protection against most common cyber attacks such as Cross-site scripting (XSS), Cross-site request forgery (CSRF), SQL injections, clickjacking, and advance hashing algorithm for weak passwords.

Django makes the journey from developing to deploying remarkably simple.  Although being bolted with so many baked in functionalities Django has proven to be extremely scalable to handle heavy real-time traffic, some of the most popular sites made on the top of Django are Instagram, Pinterest, Bitbucket, Disqus, Mozilla.

Under the hood, Django follows the Model-Template-View (MTV) architecture. Basically, the app is divided into three components, database interfacing classes (model), request-processing classes (view), and templating for the final presentation (template).

This is something similar to the traditional MVC( Model-View_Controller) frameworks, but in Django, views are more like controllers, and MVC's views are actually the template of Django this might be a little confusing at first, but as a developer getting the job done, you will cherish this more.

The best part is that Django keeps getting better. Every year a conference called DjangoCons is held across the world where developers around the globe assemble. There is a fun tradition where developers give sarcastic notes on why Django sucks? The Django core developers took these comments constructively and mitigated them in subsequent releases making the framework more robust.

Since the first launch of Django in 2003 it has been loved and accepted by a large community of developers and it's proliferating since then. If you are new to web development and confused about which Framework to choose, hands down go for Django.

Follow this tutorial to Install Django on your system: How To Install Django

To know more about Django visit their official site:https://www.djangoproject.com/

Don't forget to check the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/django/django

Make sure to star the project to show your support for the framework!