Web Development Workshop

This workshop will be centered around Server Side Rendering with Python and Django.

What is Server Side Rendering (SSR)?

To understand this let's take a look at how a normal plain static website's architecture would look.

With this approach, there is no way to add any dynamic data unless you use a JavaScript request, which may not always be ideal, because you may want the data to be displayed right on the page load to the user, instead of waiting for a separate request to finish.

Using the approach above the HTML is filled with data from the server, usually from a database.

Why use SSR (Pros)?

• You want data on your page to be seen as soon as the page gets send to the user
• You want your website to be easily indexed by search engines.
• Has a quick First Content Paint, which is just how fast the page is actually visible
• Routes are whole separate requests instead of baked into one JavaScript bundle

Why wouldn't you use SSR (Cons)?

• You want fast navigation between several pages.
• Overall the server will be busier.
• You would be creating a whole web application similar to a desktop one.

Installing Python and Django

In this we will be using Python and a web framework Django. Make sure you have at least python 3, you can check by running python --version or on Linux python3.

NOTE: On linux you may or may not have to do many steps to get python 3 and pip 3 symbolically linked in order to work. If you encounter this go HERE

After python 3 is setup run pip install django. Restart your terminal and make sure django-admin is recognized as a command. That means everything is installed.

Django File Structure

• website/ - Name of the PROJECT
  • urls.py - Where all the URL to View mapping is done
• quotes/ - Name of the APP
  • templates/quotes/*.html - Where our HTML that will be injected with our model data will go
  • admin.py - Where you can specify what models are added into the admin client
  • apps.py - Where app config data is stored
  • models.py - Where database tables and functions are stored
  • urls.py - Where the APP url to view mappings are found
  • views.py - What a user will see when a url mapped to a view is gone to

Useful Stuff

• Running the server: python manage.py runserver <PORT>
• Making a new App: python manage.py startapp <APP_NAME>
• Migrate: python manage.py migrate This will setup the database with django's custom models
• Migrate app: python manage.py makemigrations <APP_NAME> This will update the database models you created in an app
• Going to localhost:port will give you your website
• Going to localhost:port/admin will give you django's cool admin model manager
• For more information about django go HERE