Lightweight Django

Chapter 5. Client-Side Django with Backbone.js

Since the 1990s, initially leveraging some type of framework has become a staple of the way in which we create websites, applications, and services. Because frameworks help alleviate the typical overhead associated with the common tasks used to create these things, it is easy to understand their rise in popularity.

When Django was initially released, it was considered a very unique and innovative approach to web development. But let’s think about this period of time for web development. Table 5-1 displays the worldwide browser market share in late November 2005.

Table 5-1. Worldwide browser usage statistics for November 2005

Browser	Percentage
Internet Explorer	84.45%
Firefox	11.51%
Safari	1.75%
Opera	0.77%

As you can see, mobile browsers were not even in the scope of these options at the time of Django’s release. It wasn’t until the first iPhone was announced (2007) that mobile web browsing started to trend upward. Better tools (e.g., jQuery in 2006) also emerged for developing web applications and generating fast and responsive websites.

Since the advent of this new mobile age, creating useful application programming interfaces (APIs) is the de facto technique for manipulating data on the client side. Accordingly, various client-side MVC frameworks have been created to help bootstrap the process of handling different kinds of data sets.

Each client-side MVC framework also has varying levels of complexity, learning curves, and feature sets to create ...