This series of blog posts will help you get started with the Django Web Framework. Learn more and dive deeper in our intensive Django Online Bootcamp.
Video: What is a Web Framework
You probably heard the term before, but what is a web framework, and why would you want to use one in the first place? The video below will address these questions, and you can also read the transcript and recap below:
Introduction
Welcome to the section about getting started with Django. Let’s talk in general about why would you want to use a web framework in the first place? The reason for this is that the web, as a structure, as a system, grew organically.
The web is a mess
The web started as a little seedling and kept growing over time until there were lots of new technologists that kept getting stuck on top of each other and arranged to inter-operate.
There’s HTML, there’s CSS, there’s JavaScript there are databases that you all have to interact with. There are back-end languages, Python is one of those, there are database interactions with SQL and it just kept growing and growing. So that the internet became this very, very, very big thing. And it’s just really a complex mess.
This makes it hard to get a grasp of what’s going on and how to handle everything that needs to fit together to create a web app, or anything that you want to publish on the web. There’s just so much that goes into that!
Web frameworks simplify web development
The idea of a web framework is essentially that it automates repetitive web development tasks:
- Web frameworks allow you to abstract database interactions. So for example you don’t have to write SQL as a pure language, cutting down one of the languages you need to know for web development
- Web frameworks handle your L requests and your L mapping for you
- Web frameworks provide templates, and allow you to generate HTML sites on the go with a language that is more familiar to you
- And Web frameworks help with security, cashing, sessions, etc.
To sum it up in one quick go:
Web development is a mess, and web frameworks simplify web development.
Okay. So that’s why you would want to use a web framework in general. Next, check out the next video and blog in this series that talks about why you would want to use Django as a web framework.
Conclusion
Let’s recap what is a web framework again in concise writing. First and foremost: The web is a mess. You’ll want to use a web framework because it simplifies web development. More specifically, web frameworks help you:
- Automate repetitive web development tasks
- Abstract database interactions
- Handle URL requests and URL mapping
- Provide templating frameworks
- Help with security, caching, sessions, etc.
In this post you learned about what is a web framework, and why they are so useful for web development. In the next post, you will learn about why Django is a great choice for a Python web framework.