{"id":7107,"date":"2013-01-28T06:42:55","date_gmt":"2013-01-28T06:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vskills.in\/certification\/tutorial\/?p=7107"},"modified":"2024-04-12T14:17:08","modified_gmt":"2024-04-12T08:47:08","slug":"web-framework","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.vskills.in\/certification\/tutorial\/web-framework\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is a Web Framework?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Django is a prominent member of a new generation of Web frameworks<\/em>. So what exactly does that term mean?<\/p>\n

To answer that question, let\u2019s consider the design of a Web application written using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard, a popular way to write Web applications circa 1998. In those days, when you wrote a CGI application, you did everything yourself \u2014 the equivalent of baking a cake from scratch. For example, here\u2019s a simple CGI script, written in Python, that displays the ten most recently published books from a database:<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

This code is straightforward. First, it prints a \u201cContent-Type\u201d line, followed by a blank line, as required by CGI. It prints some introductory HTML, connects to a database and executes a query that retrieves the latest ten books. Looping over those books, it generates an HTML unordered list. Finally, it prints the closing HTML and closes the database connection.<\/p>\n

With a one-off dynamic page such as this one, the write-it-from-scratch approach isn\u2019t necessarily bad. For one thing, this code is simple to comprehend \u2014 even a novice developer can read these 16 lines of Python and understand all it does, from start to finish. There\u2019s nothing else to learn; no other code to read. It\u2019s also simple to deploy: just save this code in a file called latestbooks.cgi, upload that file to a Web server, and visit that page with a browser. But as a Web application grows beyond the trivial, this approach breaks down, and you face a number of problems:<\/p>\n