Test-Driven Development with Python

Part II. Web Development Sine Qua Nons

Real developers ship.

— Jeff Atwood

If this were just a guide to TDD in a normal programming field, we might be able to congratulate ourselves about now. After all, we’ve got some solid basics of TDD and Django under our belts; we’ve got all we need to start building a website.

But, real developers ship, and in order to ship, we’re going to have to tackle some of the trickier but unavoidable aspects of web development: static files, form data validation, the dreaded JavaScript, but most hairy of all, deployment to a production server.

At every stage, TDD can help us to get these things right too.

In this section, I’m still trying to keep the learning curve relatively soft, but we will meet several major new concepts and technologies. I’ll only be able to dip lightly into each one—I hope to demonstrate enough of each to get you started when you get to your own project, but you will also need to do your own reading around when you start to apply these topics in “real life”.

For example, if you weren’t familiar with Django before starting on the book, you may find that taking a little time to run through the official Django tutorial at this point would complement what you’ve learned so far nicely, and will leave you more confident with the Django stuff over the next few chapters, so you can focus on the core concepts.

Oh, but there’s lots of fun stuff coming up! Just you wait!