When building web applications, developers and development teams have two choices with the code. Build everything themselves, or use something called a web application framework. You can think of a web application framework as a toolkit containing all the components needed for application development. By using a framework, developers and development teams can focus on the application's unique features, instead of spending time developing features common to all applications. For example, developing code for user login and authentication, or building an admin dashboard. In this video, you will be given an overview of the Django framework. You will also learn about where Django is used in the real world and the types of web applications that use it. Django is an open source web development framework. It's written in Python and it was first created for a newspaper publisher web application. As a result, it's excellent for building projects that require high volumes of text content, media files and heavy traffic. The open source nature of Django has resulted in its rapid growth and adaptation, which has resulted in its usage for a wide variety of web applications. The Django framework allows easy integration with many tools and languages with support from other Python libraries. Much of the success of a web framework relies on its ability to provide a robust, secure, adaptable and scalable functionalities. Django caters to all of these requirements and provides features like templates, libraries and APIs, which are all easily manageable and scalable. Along with the publishing industry, Django is also a popular choice for eCommerce, health care, finance, transport, travel, social media and much more. Its power lies in its ability to separate features, which is helpful for organizations that need to create projects using more than one framework. For example, developers can create a back end framework with Django that can connect to a front end framework via an API. Organizations are then free to choose whatever front end framework they like, such as react or react native from Meta. On the back end, developers can make use of powerful features. These include an email system for notifications, data analysis tools, admin dashboards and development tools for online marketplaces and booking systems. As a result, it's no surprise that the Django framework is the choice of some of the world's leading companies and internet giants across various sectors. These include the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence, scalable web applications, software as a service applications. Over the top media platforms and industries like shopping, event management, news and publishing. Let's explore each of these areas now in a little more detail. First is the domain of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Developers can use Django to deploy machine learning algorithms that can be made available with the help of APIs, application programming interfaces, RPCs, remote procedure calls and WebSockets. Don't worry about these terms for now. You will learn about them in the course. Django can handle many API end points, each of which can have several ML models. Django also enables fast integration and deployment of these models. Next is scalable web applications. An important reason why Django is so popular is its ease of scalability. It's common for many web applications and tech companies to start on a small scale, but soon expand rapidly. For example, an organization building a social media app. Many popular social media apps like Instagram from Meta, use Django to meet these rising demands of memory and resource management. The principle of scalability is equally helpful for web applications, where the size of the app's user base is unknown. It critical factor of an app's ability to scale is the ability to provide fast and efficient traffic management for its users. For this reason, Django is popular for applications such as social media, magazines and blogs. Most applications that are built on the web provides some form of service. For Software as a Service or SaaS applications. This can mean platforms that provide things like data storage, app stores and version control systems. For example, Django is a popular choice for Cloud storage applications because it provides something called asynchronous views. This allows the application to run different services concurrently instead of waiting in the queue to complete each service, significantly increasing the application's performance. Finally, let's explore over the top or OTT media platforms, that provide audio and video streaming services. OTT platforms have grown in popularity recently and Django is often used to meet their needs. It's important to know that Django is not just limited to the services and sectors mentioned in this video. However, it's generally considered that Django is more suitable for large projects, because it provides good fault tolerance. Also its open source nature is inherently free, drastically reducing company's costs. Also the ease of adaptation, robustness, supportive open-source community, comprehensive documentation and security make Django popular. Ultimately, developers and organizations favorite Django because just like Python, it helps them avoid reinventing the wheel. In this video, you were given an overview of the Django framework and why it's favored for building web applications. You also learned about where Django is used in the real-world and the types of web applications that use it.
