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