Django app life cycle: standart hooks to handle start and reload?
Short answer: no.
The longer version is that it really depends on how your application is deployed. In Java for example, it's not Spring (the equivalent of Django in this analogy) that gives you an onStart hook, it's Tomcat or Jetty.
The usual interface for deploying Django, WSGI, doesn't define such hooks. A WSGI process will generally be launched from a standalone process supervisor or service script, or via an external server such as Apache. In that case you might be able to hook into some lifecycle, but that is highly dependent on the server that's wrapping your requests.
It sounds like you're trying to do something unorthodox. What exactly are you looking to accomplish?
I am trying to understand if there are standard means to handle the specific django application start (and reload). Currenly I would like to use it to start a parallel thread, but the question for me is more general: is this allowed or not allowed for some reason.
For example, such handlers are a part of the application interface in case of Java Servlets and .Net web applications. Are they a part of the interface of a django application?
UPD
In this case I am just trying to implement a small proxy which keeps an open connection. I do understand that the interface I want would initially be a part of WSGI, but it is not, and I though that django might provide its own solution, since in most cases (in all except plain CGI) the application serves more than a single request and obviously does have a life cycle.