In my previous post I wrote briefly about web frameworks and Django. In this post I will give brief introduction about different IDE to develop Django application. In the Introduction to Django series I will use Visual Studio IDE for development purpose. But I will try not use to use features or code which are purely related to Visual Studio, so that if you want to use any other IDE to run the code you can easily do that.
“Django makes it easier to build better web apps more quickly and with less code”, as mentioned on the Django project website. You can download Django from its website. While writing this post the latest version available to download is 1.8.4. But the 1.9 alpha is also released. It is recommended to use latest Python 3 version with Django 1.8.4. There are many Python IDE available and most of them support Django. Few of them are as below,
I am going to use Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) for the Django tutorial. Microsoft Visual Studio is an excellent tool for development. It has many builtin features which helps in rapid development. Visual Studio comes with many editions. Its community edition is free of cost. Microsoft introduced Visual Studio Code which is a code editing tool. And is freely available for Windows, Linux and OS X. Visual Studio Code support more than 30 languages, and used to build web and cloud applications.
Before start working on Django you must understand the basics of Python language. If you are not familiar with Python language please refer to my post Introduction to Python. Django comes with SQLLite3 database. SQLLite3 is small open source database engine. It can best use for development purpose or for a small database. Django can be use with different databases like PostgreSQL, My SQL and Oracle. I am going to use My SQL database in my Introduction to Django blog series. Pip and Virtualenv are two more important features you must get familiar.
- Pip is tool that fetches Python packages from Python Package Index and its mirrors. It is a package management system and it is included in Python 3.
- Virtualenv is a tool for creating isolated Python environments. Instead of installing all the packages in one common environment and use the same environment for all the applications is not recommended. This would create lot of problems. Instead its a good idea to create a separate virtual environment for each application. And install packages related to that application in it own virtual environment.
In my next blog I will show you how to setup Python tools for Visual Studio and create first application in Django.