Paradigms of Web Development and comparison of approaches using django and Google Appengine WebApp framework

Web development frameworks provide various features to make common web development paradigms easy to implement.

The talk covers various paradigms of web development, like authentication, session data, caching, CSRF protection, file storage, etc. seperating "what" from "how" and then compares the approaches to be taken by the developer using django and the appengine webapp framework to implement it, by examining what features they provide.

The abstractions provided by django are transparent and extensible. They will be arrived at, by starting from a simple case of implementing the paradigms manually and progressively adding abstractions. Some of the transparencies and the way to use them to achieve a few common ends, will be discussed.

The talk is an attempt to examine the web development paradigms horizontally and framework agnostic ally.

Once the problem is identified, the approach to solve it, taken by the web frameworks, django, and AppEngine webapp framework is examined. Necessary abstractions needed to make it convenient for developer to implement it, are added progressively and solutions used by the framework are arrived at.

The areas explored include:

• Authentication
• Caching
• Session Data
• CSRF Protection
• File Storage
• Data Manipulation
• Image thumbnailing
• Permissions
• Etc, time permitting

For each, the following are discussed:

• Define the problem
• The approach the developer should take to solve it
• Features provided by django
• Features provides bu App Engine
• How to bend what django provides, for customizations
• How the framework implements this feature.

How is this talk different from the /2010/talks/31-howto-django-in-gae ?

This talk covers features provided by web development frameworks and is not a tutorial on django on app engine. Django and App Engine web app frameworks are specific ones chosen to contrast and compare.

Lakshman Prasad is a partner at Agiliq: http://agiliq.com/ where he, with an expert team, does consulting and development of web applications exclusively using the django framework and the related python technology stack. Earlier, he worked on developing enterprise software using Java at Oracle India and Infosys Technologies. He has since become passionate about Django, Python and modern pragmatic tools and processes for developing web applications. He maintains an infrequent personal blog: http://becomingguru.com/ and engages actively on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/55562/lakshman-prasad on topics related to django.