From the course: Learning Django

What is Django?

From the course: Learning Django

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What is Django?

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- [Instructor] Before we dive in, let's take a look at what Django is. Looking at the official djangoproject.com website it describes Django as "a high-level, Python web framework "that encourages rapid development "and clean, pragmatic design." This likely raises the question, what is a web framework? A web framework is a collection of tools together in one package that we can use to build web applications. One important tool that Django comes with is an object-relational mapper, or ORM, which helps us make database queries. Django also comes with URL routing which helps determine what logic to follow depending on the URL of a web request. Another feature is HTML templating, which allows us to define some presentation logic and insert dynamic data into our HTML. Some other tools that come with Django are form handling and unit testing tools, as well as some other less core features. As a point of clarification, I want to mention some things that Django is not or does not include. Django is not a programming language. Python is a programming language and Django is a tool written in Python that we use to develop web applications. Django is also not itself a web server. It does contain a built in web server for convenience during development but it is not used outside of that context. When we deploy Django on a live website, it works in tandem with Apache or Nginx or other web servers. Deploying Django for a live website is beyond the scope of this course. We will mainly be focusing on using Django to develop a web project. With that in mind, we're ready to start developing with Django.

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