Valentino Gagliardi - Decoupled Django: Understand and Build Decoupled Django Architectures for JavaScript Front-ends

• In Chapters , we introduce the terminology, what makes a decoupled architecture, how modern JavaScript is supposed to work in Django, and how the Django REST framework can help you build REST APIs.

• In Chapter , we discuss the advantages and drawbacks of a decoupled architecture.

• In Chapters , we begin to build a Django project with the Django REST framework and Vue.js to show how Vue can work from within Django templates.

• In Chapter , we discuss security for REST APIs, and deployment of our Django/Vue.js project.

• In Chapter , we move to React and Next.js to show how such a framework can be paired with Django. We cover Next.js basics and data fetching.

• Chapter covers testing, both for the REST API and for the JavaScript frontend.

• Chapter covers authentication for decoupled setups and shows you how to use session-based authentication for single-page apps with the help of NGINX.

• Finally, in Chapters , we cover GraphQL in Django, with a look at running Django asynchronously.

In this chapter, we review traditional web applications, the classic MVC pattern based on views, models, and controllers.

We begin to outline use cases, benefits, and drawbacks of decoupled architectures. We explore the foundations of REST, look at how it compares to GraphQL, and learn that REST APIs are not only RESTful after all.

For at least two decades, traditional websites and applications all shared a common design based on the Model-View-Controller