I am trying to rebuild our website in Django, and I am currently facing a series of rather difficult challenges for which I am not prepared. I was hoping to get some help in the matter.
The website I am building is an online archival platform for artists called Lekha. The core of Lekha is the dashboard page (which you can check out on this link, just sign in with the email stacko@test.com and the password test if you have the patience).
On the dashboard page, users have access to a hierarchical filesystem that we would like to function like a desktop filesystem for ease of use. Users can use the filesystem to organize their 'artworks' into folders. These artworks themselves are a collection of media, along with the metadata of the artwork. To upload this media and fill in the metadata, users will use a form. If users want to edit an artwork's metadata, they can do so through an auto-populated form on the same page.
The issue that I am facing is that I am struggling to find an elegant way to make all of this happen without reloading the page. Users need to be able to add, delete, and rename folders in the filesystem without reloading the page (just like dropbox). They also need to be able to add 'artwork' database entries using a popup form, and edit 'artworks' they have created through an auto-populated form that is also served to them without reloading the page (as it is currently implemented on our existing dashboard page).
All of the Django tutorials I have seen delete items using a dedicated /delete/ page, but this would require reloading the page. Based on my research, the solution I am looking for has to do with asynchronous updating through AJAX.
I wanted to ask all the Django experts out there what the best way to go about this would be. Are there any best practices I should know about before going into this? We are building our website to be robust and scale well. Are there any specific libraries for asynchronous stuff in Django that are best? How do asynchronous websites scale if we have several users on them at the same time, and should I write the backend in any specific way to account for potential scaling issues? What is the difference between ASGI and WSGI? Are there tools that I can use such as htmx to make my life easier?
