Ajax – the best AJAX library for Django?

A "slug" is a way of generating a valid URL, generally using data already obtained. For instance, a slug uses the title of an article to generate a URL. I advise to generate the slug by means of a function, given the title (or another piece of data), rather than setting it manually.

An example:

<title> The 46 Year Old Virgin </title>
<content> A silly comedy movie </content>
<slug> the-46-year-old-virgin </slug>

Now let's pretend that we have a Django model such as:

class Article(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    content = models.TextField(max_length=1000)
    slug = models.SlugField(max_length=40)

How would you reference this object with a URL and with a meaningful name? You could for instance use Article.id so the URL would look like this:

www.example.com/article/23

Or, you might want to reference the title like this:

www.example.com/article/The 46 Year Old Virgin

Since spaces aren't valid in URLs, they must be replaced by %20, which results in:

www.example.com/article/The%2046%20Year%20Old%20Virgin

Both attempts are not resulting in very meaningful, easy-to-read URL. This is better:

www.example.com/article/the-46-year-old-virgin

In this example, the-46-year-old-virgin is a slug: it is created from the title by down-casing all letters, and replacing spaces by hyphens -.

Also see the URL of this very web page for another example.

For whatever it's worth the the creators of Django recommend PostgreSQL.

If you're not tied to any legacy system and have the freedom to choose a database back-end, we recommend PostgreSQL, which achives a fine balance between cost, features, speed and stability. (The Definitive Guide to Django, p. 15)