subject: Automatic Admin Interface: Djangos Gift To Java [print this page] There has been a big explosion of Java web frameworks in the recent times. This has left web developers with a lot of options to choose from. But outside of Java, the dynamic language ecosystem has produced its own Web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django etc. So just because it is not Java or it does not run on JVM, Java shops have not given the attention they deserved.
Django is an open source web application framework, written in Python, which follows the model-view-controller architectural pattern. It was originally developed to manage several news-oriented sites for The World Company of Kansas and was released publicly under a BSD license in July 2005. It was named after the famous jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. However Django has specific features that help the type of business applications many Java developers develop every day. So Django has come up with a great feature that makes it worthwhile for Java shops to leave the comforts of the Java language. It is called The Automatic Admin Interface.
Automatic Admin Interface:-
Django is made around reusable modules that can be put together into larger applications. Out of these apps is the automatic admin interface. It is an auto-generated UI for listing, searching, filtering the database entities and creating the add, edit, delete etc screens for them. Some frameworks claim to offer something along the same line but none of them are like ready to use straight away. It reads metadata in your model to provide a powerful and production-ready interface that content producers can immediately use to start adding content to the site. The biggest difference with Django Admin is that the developer can deploy it right away without any customizations and it would probably be more feature-rich, slick and polished than your hand-coded CRUD screens. The productivity is much better from this comparatively. Though you can use it right away, you can also customize it as you want.
The admin interface is the coolest part of Django because for most developers writing admin interface is something that was very tedious. So instead of doing the boring repetitive tasks the admin interface will do it for the developer.
Because its an optional piece (not everyone needs it) you will actually have to activate it. There are 3 steps to activation the automatic admin interface
oAdd admin metadata to your models.
oInstall the admin models.
oAdd the URL pattern to your urls.py.
The admin interface is designed to be used by non-technical users, and as such should be pretty self-explanatory. This has so far made the work of the developers much easier and has got rid of all the repetitive tasks they had to carry out. So that is why Automatic admin interface is actually an important feature for Java developers.
