A web application to practice and explore the German articles.
Go to the Der Die Das web app
This is a personal project where I put into practice what I learned in the Django for Everybody specialization (DJ4E) by the great Charles Severance.
In my mind, Django is like a grand orchestra, where each piece must work in harmony to create a fully functional web app. Views, forms, URL dispatchers, templates, models, and databases all play their part in the symphony. While every component is essential, if I had to choose one, my favorite would be Django’s Models and Object-Relational Mapping (ORM).
These tools allow you to define your data structures cleanly and elegantly using Python classes, making it easy to establish relationships between tables and perform queries. As if that weren’t enough, Django models also let you seamlessly switch between database backends and migrate your data as your project grows.
For example, although my users will never see it, I initially developed my app using SQLite, collected some user data, and then (almost 😃) seamlessly switched to MySQL for production—without losing any data.
In addition to the core concepts of the Django framework, Charles also introduced us to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, a bit of Bootstrap, and deployment. With this project, I wanted to apply all of these elements by building an interactive app where users can register, play, and review or delete their playing history.
The app is hosted on PythonAnywhere, where I’m making use of their free account. Data for German nouns, articles, word frequency, and proficiency levels comes from DWDS - Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. All icons come from Bootstrap, except for the DerDieDas icon, which I created using Krita and Inkscape—just to keep everything fully open source. 🙂
Happy playing!
clennon