A workshop on Back End Web Development using Django was organised by MRIIC and conducted by Ms. Ina Singh (Research Associate – MRIIC). Students of Computer Science Engineering, Computer Science Specialisation (Cloud Computing), Computer Science Specialisation (Cyber Security) and Electronics and Communication Engineering attended the workshop.
The workshop began with the importance and need of back-end frameworks and a discussion of the popular ones like NodeJS and Django. Then, an introduction to Django was given as a resource for perfectionists with a timeline.
The session was held in a hands-on manner where the students began right from learning how to establish a virtual environment, activate it and deactivate it. Then, a project ’mytravels’ was started using django-admin in the virtual environment. An app ‘travdash’ was also created within the project. The function of all the files in the project as well the app was explained separately to understand the flow of the project.
The development began with adding the app in the Installed Apps section of the settings.py file and making custom url paths for routing to the Home, About, Products and Contact pages in the urls.py file in the project folder. Then, view functions were defined in the views.py file of the app folder for all these webpages. Finally, HTML templates designed using Bootstrap were added to the views to provide for a better user interface.
The Home page had a subscriber section and the Contact Page had a Contact form for which models were made in the models.py file and converted to forms in the forms.py file using Modelform command. The integration of front end pages with backend database was taught in a step by step manner using the admin panel of Django that was accessed by createsuperuser functionality.
The students learned to make their own fully functional websites on the local server as well as how to deploy it on an open source platform like pythonanywhere and make it live to share as a url on the web. They were glad for the learning experience and were thankful to be given the opportunity to be a part of the workshop. They looked forward to more assignments in the web development field from MRIIC.