Porting from an App Engine RequestHandler to a Django View

For whatever reason, I've found myself porting Python App Engine apps over from App Engine's "django-esque" webapp framework to true django 1.0 with views.py, urls.py, and the like.

Besides learning about how urls.py and views.py work, I had to do some research to figure out how some of the webapp-isms translated to django-isms, so I thought I'd post my findings here in a table comparing the two:

Webapp	Django
author = self.request.get('author')	What you use depends on how specific you want to be about where parameter was passed: author = request.GET.get('author') author = request.POST.get('author') author = request.REQUEST.get('author')
class MyRequestHandler(RequestHandler): def get(self): # Do stuff def post(self): # Do other stuff	def handle_request(request): if request.method == 'GET': # do stuff elif request.method == 'POST': # do other stuff
host = self.request.host	host = request.get_host()
url = self.request.uri	url = request.build_absolute_uri(request.path)
query_string = request.query_string	query_string = request.META['QUERY_STRING']
self.error(500)	return HttpResponse(status=500) or from django.http import HttpResponseServerError return HttpResponseServerError()
self.redirect('/gallery')	from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect return HttpResponseRedirect('/gallery')
path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'index.html') self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))	from django.shortcuts import render_to_response render_to_response('index.html', path) Or, if for some reason you need the in-between products of that shortcut (like the generated string), you can use the longer version: from django.template.loader import get_template from django.template import Context t = get_template('index.html') html = t.render(Context(template_values)) return HttpResponse(html)
self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/atom+xml' self.response.out.write(xml_string)	return HttpResponse(xml, mimetype='application/atom+xml')

If you have suggestions for better "transformations", please let me know. I'm fairly new to Django and am happy to learn more about the right way to do things.