Pro Django

CHAPTER 4URLs and Views

Much of this book is split into fairly self-contained chapters, but this one covers two seemingly unrelated concepts together, because each relies very much on the other. URLs are the primary entry points to your site, while views are the code that respond to incoming events. What goes on in a view is very open-ended. Aside from accepting a request and returning a response, there's no particular protocol that views should adhere to, and no rules about what they are or aren't allowed to do.

The possibilities for views are too vast to consider describing in detail, and there aren't any utilities designed explicitly for views to use while executing. Instead, it's possible to hook into the process Django uses to map Web addresses ...