Building SPAs with Django and HTML Over the Wire
Learn to build real-time single page applications with Python
Andros Fenollosa
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Building SPAs with Django and HTML Over the Wire
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Foreword
This book is about one principle: coordination. How do we coordinate events that occur in different places and at different times within a web application? For example, if multiple users are connected to the same website and need to send messages to each other, how can we achieve fast and effective communication? Such systems are known as real-time applications.
Real-time applications are a standard in web development today. The WebSocket protocol emerged in 2011; it allows you to open a bidirectional tunnel between your web application and another component. The WebSocket protocol creates greater dynamism, and thus improves the user experience. In addition to lower resource consumption, information is updated only when necessary - this avoids redundant requests to the server.
There are many sorts of real-time applications. The first ones that come to mind are social networks or messaging applications since they are part of our daily life. We like to receive information instantly, because we don’t need to refresh the page to know if an event has occurred. We don’t want to wait, we are inherently impatient. Learning how to develop real-time applications gives us an advantage when finding new techniques to start a software project.
This work presents an alternative to JavaScript for creating Single-Page Applications; and some might worry that the author has started a crusade against JavaScript - but it’s not the case. Instead, his interest is in explaining the power of Python using WebSockets over HTML to produce real-time applications.
The author of this book, Andros Fenollosa, is a passionate web developer who, using his extensive teaching experience, will give you the necessary foundations to be involved in the development of real-time application.
Camilo Chacón Sartori,
Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (IIIA)
Contributors
About the author
Andros Fenollosa have been teaching web technologies, best practices, and the fundamentals of functional programming for more than a decade.
Since finishing his studies, he have not stopped developing applications, sometimes as a frontend developer, others as a mobile application developer, backend developer, and project manager. Currently, he is working as CTO in a software development studio.
He combine his professional work maintaining several open source projects related to Python, Django, Clojure (including my own framework: Tadam Web Framework), and Linux. He also like to share his knowledge through podcasting, writing newsletters and books, Twitter, and his blog.
About the reviewer
Norbert Máté is a senior web developer/tech lead with 13+ years of experience. His primary programming languages are Python and JavaScript. He is passionate about software architecture, clean code, and leadership. Norbert has also reviewed other Django books, such as Django RESTful Web Services and Django 2 by Example.