Applying Django Middleware

The Django Python web application framework supports the notion of middleware. What exactly is middleware? In the Django context, middleware are Python packages that do not explicitly belong to any particular Django application. Nor do these middleware packages belong to the Django package although Django does ship with some common middleware. The middleware Python packages that are independently installed sit in the middle.

So whats the point of separately installing Django components if they aren't part of either Django or the applications that use them? Well, since middleware components can be enabled in a Django application's settings, these middleware components may be shared between different applications that use the same Django installation. This keeps the Django core small.

The actual middleware components themselves are composed of classes. These classes must implicitly provide a Django middleware method. These methods can be one of process_request(), process_view(), process_response(), and process_exception().

The middleware components that an application wants to use are invoked automatically by the Django framework. All the application needs to do is enable the desired middleware components. The Django framework uses the BaseHandler class and the WSGIHandler class to invoke the middleware behavior. These classes are illustrated below.



Below is an illustration showing how the to classes, BaseHandler and WSGIHandler, collaborate to process all enabled middleware methods.