Once the project is created, we can focus on its features. Now, we can define our first User Story. In the purpose of our project, we’ll want to follow RSS feeds. We’ll need to inform our software about those feeds. Usually, the first User Story is “I want to see a form to submit my data“. Usually, to complete this User Story, developers focus on the form. That is not the approach with Django. The data is most important than the form, so we’ll start with the data, Django will make the rest much easier.

Django also makes the data manipulation easy with the Model Layer. This is the abstraction layer where you are going to define and manipulate your data model. So first we have to define and tell Django what our data is.

At this step, we plan to build an app which will load, parse and display RSS feeds. So, the system will need to know where to find the feeds, and then to parse all the items. The user should just have to provide the URL of the feed. This will be our first model and form. A very simple model which will let us see how Django deals with it. Continue reading →

Before going further on the development of our RSS reader app, lets just have a quick look about the how to work on the project with Eclipse. Actually, if you are planning to dedicate your life to Python and web development, Aptana Studio is certainly a better choice as it is an Eclipse ready to use. But if you want to build your own IDE with the plug-ins of your choice, you’ll certainly use Eclipse. But Eclipse does not support Python out of the box. As I introduced the tools in the first post of this tutorial, you’ll need to add the PyDev plug-in which will give you all the features you need. The manual and especially the Getting Started chapter provides a good explanation about how to configure the plug-in.

The manual also explains how to create a new project and how to import one. There is also a specific page for Django. If you followed the previous step of the tutorial, you already have created the project sources and you’ll need to import them. To understand why and how, lets just see how you would have done directly from Eclipse. Continue reading →

So, in the previous post, you have gathered all the tools you need. You can now focus on the project. Thus, before defining our User Stories, we need to create the project. This will start by initiating a project trough Django. This step is nicely described on the Django Tutorial, so in this post, we’ll focus on our specific need. It will be necessary to understanding the terminology used by Django and more specifically what is a Project and what is an Application.
Continue reading →