Exploring The Model-View-Template (MVT) Framework for Web Development

Overview

Web development frameworks play a crucial role in simplifying the process of building robust and scalable web applications. Django, a popular web framework, follows the Model-View-Template (MVT) architectural pattern. In this blog post, we will explore about Django, and an example.

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Introduction

Django is a well-liked web framework that offers a structured and organized manner to handle typical web development activities, making it simpler to create web applications.

It adheres to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern but is known as the Model-View-Template (MVT) pattern in Django. Here is a quick summary:

Model: This represents your application’s data model and database schema.
View: Takes care of the reasoning behind handling requests and rendering templates. In simple words, a view acts as a controller in the Django framework.
Template: The template defines the structure of the HTML pages your application will deliver.

A Guide to Set Up a Development Environment in the virtual environment

Create a virtual environment

virtualenv v_env
v_env/Scripts/activate

1 2	virtualenv v_env v_env/Scripts/activate

2. Install Django and Django rest framework using the commands below:

pip install django

1	pip install django

Create a Django Project and explore each file in the project

django-admin startproject myblog

1	django-admin startproject myblog

You can replace ‘myblog’ with your preferred project name.

This is the project structure that is automatically created.

django

About manage.py:

For our projects, this file serves as a command-line tool. This file will deploy, test, and operate our web apps.
The file includes the code needed to run the server, make migrations or migrations, and several additional commands we execute in the code editor.

About wsgi.py file:

To host your application once you’ve completed the transition from development to production. Here, the WSGI server will handle it instead of you utilizing the Django web server.
Web Server Gateway Interface, or WSGI, is the term used to describe how servers communicate with applications.
You import middleware by the server you intend to use, which is a fairly simple procedure. There is Django middleware for every server that addresses all connectivity and integration problems.

About asgi.py file:

While ASGI offers some additional features, it operates similarly to WSGI. Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface is known as ASGI. It is presently taking the place of WSGI.

About settings.py:

It includes the configuration for the Django project.
The setting.py file, which is used to add all the middleware applications, is the most crucial. The Django project’s primary setting file is located here.
This has several variable names, and your program will function as intended if you change the value.
Sqlite3 serves as the system’s default database. Depending on our web application, we can switch this database to Mysql, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB.

About urls.py:

A universal resource locator, or URL, contains all the endpoints that our website needs. It is used to give you the URLs of the online resources (such as pictures, webpages, and websites) that are accessible.
Simply said, this file instructs Django to send users to the specified website or picture, as appropriate, if they provide the specified URL.

Now, the important thing is Django works with applications, which means a Django project can have multiple applications. We can create an application using the command below:

python manage.py startapp app_name

1	python manage.py startapp app_name

Now, in the project structure, our app is created with almost similar files. Here in this app, we code based on the MVC standard.

django2

Next, we must add our app name to the project settings file, as shown below.

django3

4.Let’s create a simple hello world API in our app:

Note that we are using the files of our app. Now, we will create a view using functions

App>Views.py file

from django.shortcuts import render
from django.http import HttpResponse

def hello(request):
    return HttpResponse("Hello, world!")

from django.shortcuts import render

from django.http import HttpResponse

def hello(request):

return HttpResponse("Hello, world!")

App>urls.py file

from django.urls import path
from .views import *

urlpatterns = [
    path('hello', hello),
]

from django.urls import path

from .views import *

urlpatterns = [

path('hello', hello),

]

We are done with the setup of all our app codes. We will focus on project routing.

Project>urls.py file

from django.contrib import admin
from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    path('admin/', admin.site.urls),
    path('api/v1/', include("hello_world_blog.urls"))
]

from django.contrib import admin

from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [

path('admin/', admin.site.urls),

path('api/v1/', include("hello_world_blog.urls"))

]

5. Run Server

python manage.py runserver

1	python manage.py runserver

Using the above command, our project will start running on localhost 8000, and you can ignore the warnings as we didn’t deal with models and databases in our example.

django4

Now, Open the browser and hit the URL per the routing config done in the project and app.

6. Make Migrations:

We must execute the command below before starting the server if any models are configured.

Python manage.py makemigrations

1	Python manage.py makemigrations

This command will detect models and will be ready to push them to the database configured in settings.py

Once we know the models/entities, we can migrate them using the command below to our database. This procedure is like executing ddl commands programmatically.

Python manage.py migrate

1	Python manage.py migrate

Conclusion

Every Django application you make contains every file we’ve spoken about so far. These files’ primary goal is to give you backend support.

However, the two primary files we will work with our settings.py and urls.py. The web application you develop will have distinctive functionality thanks to the changes you make to these files.

Drop a query if you have any questions regarding Django and we will get back to you quickly.

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FAQs

1. Does Django fall under the content management system?

ANS: – No, Django is not a content management system. Rather, it is a web framework and a programming tool for creating websites.

2. Where does the Django controller exist?

ANS: – Yes, Because Django’s controllers are kept in views.py files, this naming convention can confuse beginners with an MVC background.

WRITTEN BY Imraan Pattan

Imraan is a Software Developer working with CloudThat Technologies. He has worked on Python Projects using the Flask framework. He is interested in participating in competitive programming challenges and Hackathons. He loves programming and likes to explore different functionalities for creating backend applications.