I am currently developing my first more complex Web Application and want to ask for directions from more experienced Developers.
First I want to explain the most important requirements.
I want to develop a Web App (no mobile apps or desktop apps) and want to use as much django as possible. Because I am comfortable with the ecosystem right now and don't have that much time to learn something new that is too complex. I am inexperienced in the Javascript World, but I am able to do a little bit of jQuery.
The idea is to have one database and many different Frontends that are branded differently and have different users and administrators. So my current approach is to develop a Backend with Django and use Django Rest Framework to give the specific data to the Frontends via REST. Because I have not that much time to learn a Frontend-Framework I wanted to use another Django instance to use as a Frontend, as I really like the Django Template language. This would mean one Django instance one Frontend, where there would be mainly TemplateViews. The Frontends will be served on different subdomains, while the backend exposes the API Endpoints on the top level domain.
It is not necessary to have a Single Page App. A Normal Website with mainly the normal request/response-cycle is fine.
Do you think this is a possible approach to do things? I am currently thinking about how to use the data in the frontend sites in the best way. As I am familiar with the Django template language I thought about writing a middleware that asks about the user details in every request cycle from the backend. The thought is to use a request.user as normally as possible while getting the data from the backend.
Or is ist better to ask these details via jQuery and Ajax Calls and don't use the django template language very much?
Maybe there is also a way to make different Frontends for the same database without using REST?
Or what would you think about using a database with each frontend, which changes everytime I make a change in the main database in the backend? Although I don't really like this approach due to the possibility of differences in data if I make a mistake.
Hopefully this is not to confusing for you. If there are questions I will answer them happily. Maybe I am also totally on the wrong track. Please don't hesitate to point that out, too.
I thank you very much in advance for your guiding and wish you a nice day.
as per my experience and knowledge, you are almost going towards correct direction.
my recommendation is for making backend rest api Django and django rest framework is the best option however for consuming those api you can look for the angular or react both works very well in terms of consuming API.
Thank you for your input om tripathi.
I think it really does make sense to use the modern js frameworks for consuming a REST API.
I looked a little further into my problem and found multitenancy to fit my requirements perfectly. There are also great plugins and good reads for that use case. Just for others some informations I stumbled upon:
https://djangopackages.org/grids/g/multi-tenancy/
https://www.vinta.com.br/blog/2017/multitenancy-juggling-customer-data-django/
Especially the second link gave me information about different design approaches. For myself I chose to go the way with one database for every Client and then using the site framework from django to seperate data. For the Subdomain resolving I use django-hosts.
Thank you again and have a nice day.
Related
I have a Django web front-end that consumes data from a REST API backend.
Even the users are made and created on the backend.
My Problem :
How to use 3rd party apps within this system, that heavily depend on django models/ORM ?
Is there something that can provide some bridge between the REST API resources and the ORM?
How can this problem be dealt with ?
Update
DRY principal seems to be failing in this situation.
Probably things have changed since this question has been originally posted. Now there are a couple of interesting related questions on StackOverflow about this topic.
To code yourself a solution as explained in this answer, you can create an external service layer (aka services.py) and write there the logic to access the external resources. Your views will consume this layer, and make the proper actions. There are other questions that provide help on how to pass information from the original request received by the django-view to the external service like this or this
There is also a django app that takes this situation into account as explained in this answer. django-roa uses the Resource Oriented Architecture paradigm to solve this.
I'm facing a similar obstacle with a new ecommerce project.
The project is a front end to a full-fledged store management software (CMS+ERP+CRM). It needs to use the master product database, but have its own entries for product reviews, ratings and so on.
The initial thought was to make a cached copy of the master database. The website will benefit from fast loading times for the cached items, but the implementation is not trivial.
After some considerations, the selected approach was updating the website's DB from the management program. This way the website's copy will always be correct, and most of the implementation doesn't need to worry about REST services (it'll still be used for user registration, shipment tracking etc.)
In your case, where you can't have the service update your own database remotely, you need to come up with a mechanism that allows you to refer to REST recourses like regular models, and that caches them in the background.
Important note: research for a way to make sure the cache is always correct (non-dirty)...
I'm not sure I completely understand your question or requirements. The way I am reading it, you have a primary back-end which is basically a black-box, and you want to use some 3rd-party apps in your project which use the Django ORM.
I am unclear as to why there would be a need for being able to have a two-way synchronization between the two data-stores. The users of your project would be returned data from your primary back-end, and from the project's ORM.
Since you are concerned about saving the "ORM" data in your primary back-end, maybe you would consider creating a Transaction Middleware that would fire any time ORM data gets updated, which could serialize the structure being saved and transmit it to your REST API. This REST API, I assume, is able to accept arbitrary data structures?
You'll probably at least want to use some form of middleware, and maybe a utility module/class to help form the "bridge".
Wanting to get some feedback on frameworks. Web/Desktop. It doesn't seem to be much difference in most respects expect web can go everywhere and desktop can't.
For a small user base however using database database driven application, where 70% input would come from files, and 30% for the user. Would I get more benefit from a desktop based solution like Camelot Camelot or Dabo & Pyjamas matched against say Django, Grok, Plone or Pyramid?
I was going to learn django based largely on docs Django Book and apparent ease of learning. Thought i should check first before diving in if its the most appropriate.
For data driven project where display/input/reporting facilites(charts/graphs) required is there a best fit or a "better fit". Can't see that I would loose anything by using a web framework for this these days, but where the desired output is more "business" logic based rather than a web page which avenue should i go web v desktop and if either better option?
Edit: I have found another possible solution/answer web2py web2py
I think you'll find web2py very easy to learn and use. Note, if desired, you can easily distribute your web2py app to individual users for installation on their own computer like a desktop app (using the browser as the user interface) -- see here. The users don't need to have anything else installed on their computer (not even Python), and web2py itself doesn't require installation, just unzipping.
I'm writing a set of REST services for a Django project. I've been using django-rest-framework for a while. Because of its limited functionality I had to switch to django-piston which I quite enjoy.
However, django-rest-framework had one really nice feature - it was able to display an admin-like interface for testing the created services from the browser. It's just terrific for debugging purposes. It's very simple: one form is displayed for each HTTP method like "GET", "POST", etc. Along with that a drop-down list of available content types and a text field for putting in the data to be sent.
As I view it, this isn't really a feature in any way directly connected with a particular REST framework. It isn't even necessarily about Django. It could all be achieved just using HTML + JS, or an external website.
My question is: What do you use for manual testing / debugging web services? Could you point me to some HTML snippet or a Django app that would do the described thing?
This may seem obvious, but:
Why not just use Django's testing client (django.test.client.Client)? then instead of manually 'debugging' in your browser, you can write unit tests with expectations and get leverage out of those further down the track.
e.g.
from django.test.client import Client
client = Client()
resp = client.put('/employee/2/', data={'email': 'here#there.com'}, follow=True)
#... etc
As the author of django-rest-framework it'd be great to pick your brains about which bits of functionality could do with fleshing out. :) (obv i've got some thoughts of my own and areas I'm planning to work on, but be really good to get some user perspective)
Your absolutely right about the API browser not being limited to any particular framework. To me that's the big deal with DRF and I'd love to see more API frameworks take a similar approach. One of the supposed benefits of RESTful APIs is that they should be self-describing, and it seems counter-intuitive to me that so many of the Web APIs we build today are not Web browseable.
Oh, and totally agree with jsw re. testing Web APIs in django, I wouldn't use the framework's browsable API to replace automated tests.
I had the same problem and that was eaily solved by logging out of admin page in that project.
I'm a C/C++ developer and I also have experience developing web apps with C#, ASP.NET MVC and fluent nhibernate. I'm looking for non-MS alternatives for web development and I'm really interested in python so I went out after Django but I've been told that Django makes it difficult for me to personalize my HTML (not sure if this is accurate).
What I'm looking for is a Python web development framework that is integrated with an ORM, is able to generate the interfaces BUT provides an easy way for me to customize the interface to create an AJAX intensive app
go for django.
does all you wanted,
has perfect docs and even free book,
partially runs on appengine,
has really large user base,
it is mature:
db sharding, (With model router)
xss protection in forms
memcache,
localisation,
well tested support for unicode,
really easy to learn because of level of it documentation.
I'm using Flask (a very minimal web framework) and SQLAlchemy as my ORM. I'm exceedingly happy with it. Disclaimer: I'm only using this for personal projects at the moment, though I do plan to launch a web app in the next 6 months using this setup.
Various options in Python you can look at -
Django (obviously!)
Pylons
Nagare
Flask
Django is really good. And no your info is not correct, HTML templates are real easy to edit them.
Also this is from a developer of Nagare -
Ajax without to write any Javascript
code or the use of continuations makes
a Web application looks like a desktop
one. In fact we have often found that
developers like you, without prior Web
experiences, can be quicker to get
Nagare because they have nothing to
"unlearn".
I am going deeper into this framework Since you said that your app is AJAX intensive. From what I have heard, Nagare makes it easy to do so...
All these frameworks are really good. Some are really good in some areas, others not. So may be explore them all & see which best suits your purpose.
For Web applications development, we're using Nagare, coming with YUI for AJAX communications.
Having a look to Nagare might be an option.
I'm in agreement with the rest of the answers and think that Django is by-far the best choice as a "complete framework" and I think their template system is second-to-none.
If you are looking to create an ajax intensive application, I'd suggestion checking out django-piston (http://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home). Piston is a REST API framework built on top of Django. I've used it for a number of ajax intensive applications and have found it's workflow to be incredibly clean, quick and flexible.
If you are wanting to go a bit slimmer and lighter-weight though, I'd suggest checking out web.py (http://webpy.org/) or Tornado (http://www.tornadoweb.org/).
I would definitely look into Pylons which is very thoroughly documented and has sql alchemy (one of the best python ORM's) baked in. Plus it's easy to setup and learn.
I currently am working with a framework called restish which is flavor of pylons that (surprise, surprise) puts the focus on sticking to RESTful web design. I don't think it's exactly what you're looking for in that it lacks good documentation and any form of an ORM.
Just A side note I'm pretty sure that Django uses Mako templating which gives you excellent control over the HTML.
I know python and have just read a basic intro of django. I have to built something like a travel website with real time updates. Will django be sufficent for this? Somebody advised me to look at django-CMS, I couldn't find a very beginner's tutorial there. Should I opt for django-CMS? Also how much of django should i know before i can try out django-cms?
Edit: Not too much real time stuff but just updates on the fly, like availibilty etc. Do i really need CMS?
Thanks
From your brief description it sounds like the main part of you project will be something that manages travel information and displays it to visitors to a website. This definitely sounds like something Django would be perfect for.
Django projects tend to be very modular, so the content management part of you code would likely be completely distinct from the travel parts of your project. Personally I'd start with the core travel functionality, rather than start out with worrying about content management. Then once you have that in place you'll be better positioned to decide whether django-cms fits your content needs, or whether something hand rolled will do.
Start by defining your models for the travel application. Then register those models with the admin. Get happy with how the data is modelled and then try and create one of the basic views. You should have something up and running pretty quickly.
You might also be interested in the GeoDjango project http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/GeoDjango which provides lots of geographical and mapping tools - which sounds pretty relevant to your project.
I would say no. Django CMS is well designed, if you change content frequently. It has nice features to build up a page. But that means it only shows its benefits, when you create a lot pages/subpages and so on.
For a simple website that only presents data, without adding new pages/views, Django will suffice.
And from my experience, you should at lest be familiar with Views and URLs in order to use Django CMS well. But the same applies to Django itself. Everything else can be found on google.
Hope that helps.