Page requests to the metal - Backend web framework

This post is part of the page requests to the metal series where we cover all the steps from a web request down to the electrons that move in the CPU, see the intro/overview page to see where this fits in.

Once the general purpose web framework such as NGinx or Apache has handled the incoming request and has found that the URL will need processing by a Python endpoint it will use a WSGI interface to pass the information over to a Python process.

Since dealing with web requests is a common activity for people making internet apps there's a class of Python software that are known as Web frameworks that will handle the most common web related programming tasks. We will use Django for the example here, but in practice we could use other frameworks like Flask too and it would only really change this one section of the article.

Django

At this point the code enters into our web framework, in this case Django.

Django URL routing:

The web framework must create the needed content by first dealing with the incoming URL to decide what content needs to be generated and how errors are to be handled. The first step is parsing the incoming URL paths and then dispatching to the relevant functions that must be called for that URL.

The Django URL dispatcher takes the incoming path and then routes it to the appropriate view function that will handle that incoming request. In Django's settings.py we have the following:

ROOT_URLCONF = 'ToTheMetal.urls'

This specifies the Python module where Django has the entry point for URL dispatching. This is the first place that will be searched for a variable called  urlpatterns which should be a list containing instances of django.conf.urls.url() types.

The base urls file (ToTheMetal/ToTheMetal/urls.py) is fairly simple:

from django.conf.urls import url, include
from django.contrib import admin

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^admin/', admin.site.urls),
    url(r'^$', views.add_two_numbers_page, name='add-two-numbers-page'),

You'll notice that there are url "tuples" of regular expressions that define URL paths and functions. When a regex gets a match Django will call the associated function. Django's URL dispatcher works by linearly searching this list until the first regex match occurs at which point the associated URL handler function gets called with any of the results in regex capture groups getting forwarded the function as arguments. If we match '^admin/ it takes us to the admin page and otherwise if we match ^$ (which matches an empty string, the base URL) it will then take us to the URLs defined in the python module add_two_numbers.urls. Because we are using Python module paths match filesystem paths so that module is found at ToTheMetal/add_two_numbers/urls.py :

# URL routing for the add_two_numbers app

from django.conf.urls import url

from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^$', views.add_two_numbers_page, name='add-two-numbers-page'),

Now if we match the regex ^$ again we call the function in the second argument which is views.add_two_numbers_page. This is our view function.

If no match can be made by the end of the urlpatterns Django will call the 404 error handler and if no custom handler is defined it will use the default one to respond with a 404 status code.

Django view

The Django view is the code that deals with the incoming request and generates the HTTP response.

In this case we have a function add_two_numbers_page in ToTheMetal/add_two_numbers/views.py

from django.template import loader, RequestContext
from django.http import HttpResponse

from .forms import AddTwoNumbersForm

def add_two_numbers(first, second):
    """Add two numbers together
    :first: first number
    :second: second number
    """
    result = first + second
    return result

def add_two_numbers_page(request):
    """Add two numbers"""
    if request.method == "GET":
        form = AddTwoNumbersForm()
        template = loader.get_template("add_two_numbers/add_two_numbers.html")
        return HttpResponse(template.render({'form': form}, request))
    elif request.method == "POST":
        form = AddTwoNumbersForm(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            result = add_two_numbers(
                form.cleaned_data["number1"],
                form.cleaned_data["number2"]
            )
            return HttpResponse("Answer is {}".format(result))

This takes the incoming request and deals with what's needed to handle HTTP responses and render the page.

When a user submits a POST request we go down the "POST" branch of the conditional and then need to check that the form input is valid. It turns out the properly handling forms is a bit complex so instead of writing a lot of code for processing forms each time we have a new project we can use the well tested forms functionality found in Django. So our form code looks like this (ToTheMetal/add_two_numbers/forms.py):

from django import forms

class AddTwoNumbersForm(forms.Form):
    """A form for adding two numbers together"""
    number1 = forms.IntegerField(label="number1")
    number2 = forms.IntegerField(label="number2")

This generated the HTML for the form earlier and now will generate all the form validation code for when we call .is_valid() as well. This saves us a lot of time (for example it implemented the CSRF protection for us) but introduces another layer of abstraction.

After this we again use the Django forms functionality to clean the data before calling the add_two_numbers function.

In the next steps we will see how the add_two_numbers function creates the answer by looking into how Python itself executes this code.