The 27 Libraries You Must Check out to Start Development with Django

Dec 9, 2021 | Technical

Whether you are developing a new web app or working on an existing one, you need to use the best tools to help you accomplish your goals. This post will review and analyze 27 libraries that are must-haves for web development with Django.

A library is a tool that lets you write and manage code more quickly and easily. Django framework for Python web development provides many libraries to make you more productive. I have created a list of 27 of my favourite ones. These libraries can make developing a website much faster, and they will save you from reinventing the wheel. In this post, I will also provide the link to each library’s documentation so you can get started right away.

The following is a categorized list of 27 libraries that you should check out on your journey to building Django powered websites:

Admin Panel

1. Django – Grappelli – A modern-shiny skin for the Django administrative interface.

 Django-Grappelli is an admin interface that is a powerful tool for managing Django website’s data – some might call it a CMS. It adds a consistent and grid-based look and feel, and neat features. With GRAPPELLI, Foreign Keys, Many-to-Many Relationships, and Generic Relations will have Autocompletes. 

With django-grappelli, you can use the Admin interface to build a super customizable administration interface quickly. You can change every part of it, like buttons, layout, and each field’s colour. It supports jQuery, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Bootstrap. Overall, an excellent admin interface for the admin of a Django project.

https://grappelliproject.com/

2. Django-jet – Modern responsive admin interface for Django with improved functionality.

This is a good starting point if you are new to Django. The admin interface is not the most valuable and powerful, but it’s effortless to get started with. You can use django-jet as a template if you begin with Django and want to build your first admin interface quickly. It has a straightforward design, that gives the user the feeling they are on a responsive website. It’s got many useful features, like breadcrumbs, customizing search, sorting and pagination, etc. It also has some excellent looking charts, which can help you create beautiful reports.

https://github.com/geex-arts/django-jet

3. Django-suit is an alternative Admin-Interface for Django (free for personal use only).

Django-suit is a free alternative to the standard Django admin interface. It’s meant to be an alternative to the admin interface of the Django framework, and was created for use in non-commercial applications. The interface offers a different set of options, which include: ability to upload, manage, and delete files; file manager; image and video uploader; media library and management; template builder, and more.

https://djangosuit.com/

4. A Django-xadmin drop-in replacement comes with a ton of features.

Django-xadmin is a drop-in replacement of the Django Admin project, which comes with many goodies.

With a large part of your time being spent on the task of designing a website, you’ll likely spend a lot of time dealing with the administration end of things, too. What good is it if you can’t easily add or remove users? Or change the default look of the dashboard? That’s where xadmin comes in. If you’re using the Django framework, it should be pretty simple to get set up and start using it right away.

https://github.com/sshwsfc/xadmin

5. Jet-bridge admin panel offers an intuitive interface for any application (ex Jet Django).

Jet-bridge is a great admin panel framework for any application. You can use it with any application to display forms, upload images, show messages, and other useful features. With its intuitive interface, Jet-bridge is an ideal tool for beginners. All aspects of the interface can be customized with ease.

https://github.com/jet-admin/jet-bridge

6. Wooey – Django app that generates automatic web interfaces for Python scripts.

The Wooey web interface lets you run Python scripts from the command line. Think of it as a convenient way to publish your scripts on the web whenever you need to analyze data, process files, or anything else. The purpose of Woodey was to make it easy for data analysts to analyze data.

https://github.com/wooey/wooey

7. Django-allauth – Django authentication that “just works.”

When you need to authenticate a user’s identity, it can often be a pain to figure out what to use and how to get it working. Fortunately, we’ve got all the answers to your Django authentication questions right here! AllAuth is a project that makes it incredibly easy to use various third-party services in conjunction with Django to add social login, password signup, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC) and more! Let’s take a look at how to get started with all this goodness.

https://github.com/pennersr/django-allauth

8.Django-oauth-toolkit – OAuth 2 goodies for Django.

If you are using the Django framework to build a web application, you will most likely need to authenticate the user, and it can be a real hassle. Luckily there is a really good solution in the form of the oauth2-toolkit. This is an extension of the django-social-auth project.

With a few lines of code, you can add OAuth 2 support to your site. A simple library for Django (Python) that does OAuth 2.0 requests. It also includes a basic authentication module that does Basic Authentication (HTTP Basic) for you.

https://github.com/jazzband/django-oauth-toolkit

CMS

9. Django.Django-cms – A Django-based enterprise content management system.

Django-CMS is a powerful open source web application built on top of the Django framework. Its goal is to make developing a website as easy as possible for beginners and advanced developers. Django-CMS allows you to build a fully customizable website using simple web forms without having to deal with code. In addition to its simplicity, Django-CMS also offers an extensive admin interface, which means you can manage everything from a single page. It’s free and open source, making it the best project.

https://www.django-cms.org/en/

10. FeinCMS – A powerful Content Management System built on Django.

MeinCMS is an incredibly stupid content management system. There is nothing about content in it – just enough for you to create an admin interface for your own page content types. A drag-and-drop interface lets you reorder page content blocks, and you can add as many blocks as you want to a region (such as the sidebar, the main content region, or something else you haven’t considered yet). A helper function provides ordered lists of page content blocks. 

https://github.com/feincms/feincms

11. Wagtail – A Django content management system.

Developers built Wagtail for developers. Wagtail is a Django app that integrates with everything else in your tech stack. In Wagtail, you can do anything you can do in Python – machine learning, image manipulation, and PDF generation. Configuration is easy, so you can focus on optimizing your site.

https://wagtail.io/

Caching

12. Django-cache-machine – Automatic caching and invalidation for Django models.

This project aims to provide automatic cache invalidation for Django models. This will enable you to set up a Django application to be able to automatically cache and invalidate objects based on various events in your code. So for example, you could use this to cache the results of a view, and then immediately invalidate it once a user performs a delete action. This is especially useful for applications with many requests to the same data and would benefit from a more efficient caching mechanism.

https://github.com/django-cache-machine/django-cache-machine

13. Django-cacheops – A fast, slick ORM cache with automatic, event-driven, granular invalidation.

The Django-CacheOps project aims to make the Django ORM more suitable for caching. The project is led by Daniel Lindsley, who is also the author of django-mptt, a Django project that provides an object-oriented approach to using Django’s built-in tree-based model class system. This is a bit different from the traditional way of doing things, as it allows developers to use models as caches.

https://github.com/Suor/django-cacheops

Debugging Tools

14. Django-debug-toolbar – Displays a variety of debugging information for Django.

Debug tools are useful tools for troubleshooting issues. They let you see exactly what’s happening in your application, and that can help you find bugs, solve problems, and make changes to improve your code. Django-debug-toolbar is a free, open source plugin for Django. It allows developers to log all requests, view database queries, and examine HTTP headers and responses.

https://github.com/jazzband/django-debug-toolbar

15. Django-devserver – The runserver of Django can be replaced with Django-devserver.

When starting a new Django project, the first thing you should do is to install django-devserver. This is a development server designed to replace the default Django server provided by the standard Django project. It works by spawning a new WSGI daemon that runs the application, listens on a given port, and responds to HTTP requests. In this way, you can view the application’s source code on a local host by using a web browser.

https://github.com/dcramer/django-devserver

E-commerce

16. Django-oscar – an open-source e-commerce framework designed to be used with Django.

This project’s main objective is to provide Django with a complete e-commerce framework. The framework provides basic functionality needed to set up an e-commerce website. All the functionalities are provided through simple Django classes, which makes the system setup easy. There is a pre-built user management system that can create users. Users can be granted access to different sections of the site and can be logged in or logged out of the site using sessions. The admin interface provides an administrative panel where all the settings for the whole application can be configured.

 http://oscarcommerce.com/

17. Django-shop – A Django based shop system.

Django-Shop is a minimalistic Shop Management System (SMS) written in Python and based on the Django web framework. The project aims to create a simple, fast, and powerful shopping solution. It’s designed for people who want to build a fully functional ecommerce site using the best tools available. The initial plan is to support multiple currencies, multiple payment methods, inventory management, and product listing.

https://github.com/awesto/django-shop

18. Merchant – A Django app for accepting payments from different payment processors.

This simple Django app is made to help build out a test network. The app allows merchants to accept payments from various payment processors easily. It provides two kinds of API’s – one to allow users to make requests to the app, and one to give access to a variety of payment processors, such as Stripe and Dwolla.

https://github.com/agiliq/merchant

Forms

19. Django-crispy-forms – A Django app that allows you to create beautiful forms in an elegant and DRY manner.

Django-Crispy-Forms is a django app developed by Thomas de Valk, which lets you create beautiful forms in a very elegant and DRY way. It was built on top of crispy-forms.js, a library which is a wrapper around form validation, form rendering, and a whole lot more.

https://github.com/django-crispy-forms/django-crispy-forms

20. Django-remote-forms – A Django form serializer that is platform-independent.

Django-remote-forms is a Python library that helps you easily build forms to be used with remote backend APIs. It’s a simple wrapper around Django REST framework’s Serializer API which will generate a client-side form from a remote endpoint’s response. In addition, it also allows you to save responses directly into the database, which is useful when your client-side form submission logic is already built using an external tool like Angular or React.

https://github.com/WiserTogether/django-remote-forms

21. Django-countries – Provides data fields for models and forms related to countries.

Django-countries is a very useful Django app that provides a country field for models and forms. Django-countries is an app designed to be very helpful when working with models and forms and when working with countries.

We all know how many countries there are in the world, but how many times have you needed a count of the countries available for a given model or form? If the answer is ‘not at all’, you should check out Django-Countries.

https://github.com/SmileyChris/django-countries

22. GeoDjango – A world-class geographic web framework.

The GeoDjango module provides a comprehensive set of tools and classes to facilitate the creation of geographic applications. This is an awesome web framework and it can be used in any language to build spatial web applications. GeoDjango is developed and maintained by the Python Software Foundation.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/gis/

Job Scheduler

23. Django-schedule – A calendaring app for Django.

Python django-schedule is a simple, yet powerful web application that allows you to schedule events in a simple web form. It is based on Django’s ORM (Object Relational Mapper), and therefore, is compatible with Django’s flexible models and forms.

https://github.com/thauber/django-schedule

News Feed

24. Django-activity-stream – Generates generic activity streams from your site’s actions.

Django-activity-stream is a new Python package that generates “generic” activity streams (e.g. RSS feeds, Atom feeds, JSON feeds) from the events produced by web applications. A summary of all activities within a specific area of your site can be displayed.

https://github.com/justquick/django-activity-stream

Permission

25. Django-rules – Provides Django with object-level permissions without the need for a database.

Django-rules is a tiny but powerful app providing object-level permissions to Django, without requiring a database. Instead of doing authorization at the table level, Django-rules authorizes on the model level. If a user wishes to create, edit, or delete a particular instance of a model, they must submit a request to the admin page for that model, and then the permission model decides whether to allow the request. If you’re working with other models, you can set Django-rules up to control the creation, editing, or deletion of those models, too.

https://github.com/dfunckt/django-rules

RESTful API

26. Django-rest-framework – An open-source framework for developing web APIs services.

Django-Rest-Framework (DRF) is a pythonic framework designed for building fast, modern Web APIs. It uses clean design patterns and simple conventions and helps to make it really easy to create powerful web APIs without all the complexity of other frameworks. The goal of DRF is to help developers quickly and easily create the RESTful services they need to build their next great app.

https://www.django-rest-framework.org/

Search

27. Djano-haystack – Modular search for Django.

Djano-haystack is a lightweight search engine built on top of the django framework. By combining Django model classes and a powerful query language, you can build your own search application. To start, Djano-haystack lets you define a simple interface to build a query that looks like this: {query}. You can choose how many fields your search app supports, what types of values those fields can hold and how to index the fields. Then you can add more fields to the interface, like {field1:[0 TO 10]}, {field2:[1 TO 20]}, etc., to give your query more flexibility.

https://github.com/django-haystack/django-haystack

Conclusion

In conclusion, it’s important to understand that Django is not only an application framework, it is also a way of thinking. And learning how to think like a developer is much more than just learning the syntax of Python. You have to learn how to think about problems, organize your code, and design solutions that work together. That’s where this list of 27 Django libraries comes in handy! Learn how to think like a Django developer by checking out these libraries. They will help you start developing web applications the right way!

Unsolved Questions to answer

Sep 24, 2020 | Technical

Five big philosophical questions:

1. Do we really have free will?
2. Can we know anything at all?
3. Who am “I”?
4. What is death?
5. What would “global justice” look like?

5 Big Unanswered Science Questions:

1. Why does the universe exist?
2. What is a matter made of?
3. How did life originate?
4. How does consciousness emerge from the human brain?
5. Is there intelligent life on other worlds?

The 7 Biggest Unanswered Questions in Physics:

1. What is a matter made of?
2. Why is gravity so weird?
3. Why does time seem to flow only in one direction?
4. Where did all the antimatter go?
5. What happens in the gray zone between solid and liquid?
6. Can we find a unified theory of physics?
7. How did life evolve from nonliving matter?

What is VSAT?

Sep 14, 2020 | Technical

VSAT Definition:

VSAT – Very Small Aperture Terminal – a micro-Earth station that

uses satellite communications technology for reliable satellite communications.

Earth To Satellite Communication

Indoor Unit (IDU)

Satellite Modem: The router transmits modulated carrier either SCPC or TDMA to the radio frequency transceiver using a coaxial cable and with the Intermediate Frequency (IF) band (typically, L-band). 

Outdoor Unit (ODU)

A typical ODU consists of the following:

• Connecting RF cable
• RFT – Radiofrequency Transceiver – includes U/C up-converter, Solid State Power Amplifier (SSPA), Down Converter 
• LNA – Low noise amplifier – It could be a separate unit esp. in DAMA system.

The transceiver is responsible for converts IF frequency band to the required C-, X-, Ku- or Ka-higher frequency band and transmits the converted band and amplified signal to the satellite transponder.

A satellite dish antenna does the further amplification of the signal and forms the focused beam directed to the satellite.

Satellite

Geostationary satellites are used generally for building a VSAT network. 

VSAT Antenna do hot have to track the Geo Satellites as they are stationary due to placement of it in Geostationary orbit.

Satellite to Earth Communication

The satellite amplifies the received signals and transmits it applying different frequencies. Communication satellites re-transmit signals received from the satellite dishes back to the Earth. 

An unlimited number of VSAT antennas whining a coverage zone of the satellite can receive the signal transmitted by the satellite.

Three layers of Protocol in the VSAT network:

• Satellite Access Protocol
• Satellite Network Access Protocol
• User Data Protocol

Satellite Access Protocol

VSAT shares the Satellite bandwidth and there three ways to do it:

1. Frequency Division Multiple Access FDMA

2. Time Division Multiple Access TDMA

3. Code Division Multiple Access CDMA

FDMA,

FDMA allow sharing of satellite capacity by using a different frequency assignment for each carrier. 

In this way, each VSAT terminals shares the available capacity by carriers transmission at a distinct frequency. The carriers can have distinct power or bandwidth, but the total sum must be within designated capacity.

TDMA, 

TDMA allows accessing the allocated capacity in a time-shared mode.

 It is a multiplexing technique in which sub-channels within a single carrier are used to streams of multiple bit transmission simultaneously. There are timeslots available for each sub-channels to give separation between Data Transmission. It allows several VSAT stations to share the same frequency channel by dividing the signal into different time slots.

CDMA, a pseudo-random sequence encodes the initial signal by overlaying the signal over a larger bandwidth. 

The receiver compares the composite input with the original encoding sequence stored in its memory, in order to restore the original signal.

Satellite Network Access Protocols:

Network Controller at Hub assigned the capacity requested by the VSATs.

There are three ways:

• on-demand,
• at random,
• permanently.

on-demand assignment protocol: 

The VSAT sends the request to hub for a capacity which is pre-assigned, which may be either carriers or a time slot. 

random assignment protocol: 

In this type of assignment, once the traffic is available at one of its data port VSAT transmits. 

permanent assignment protocol: 

The VSAT can access permanently to a small portion of the satellite capacity. 

Time Division Multiplex Time Division Multiple Access

• Very efficient
• Use mostly in interactive data applications
• Data in packetized form
• Each packet contains an address that represents a data terminal within the VSAT network domain.

Hub-to-VSAT link:

• Hub to VSAT link is a single carrier. It is the result of multiplexing all the packets from different customers and directing them to the various VSATs in the network.
• Each VSAT listens to the total traffic carried by the outbound carrier.
• However, each VSAT will only decode those packets having control information or addresses to one of the interfaces.

VSATs-to-hub link:

There may be one or many incoming carriers.

The incoming carriers carry traffic from the VSAT terminal to the hub.

It will transmit to the hub if a VSAT needs to communicate with a peer.

Demand Assignment Multiple Access (DAMA) 

It is an access protocol that allows each channel to use one carrier pair in a Single Channel Per Carrier – SCPC mode to establish a link.

They are used for voice circuits.