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If you've just started learning web development, then you’ve probably heard a lot of talk about front-end and back-end development. But what exactly do these words mean? And what exactly is the difference between them? That's what we'll know here.
What’s front-end development?
The site's Front-end is what you see and interact with in the browser, as it represents the development of the user interface of texts, colors, buttons, or images. For example, if you want to develop a restaurant site, you will put the information about the restaurant, whether it is the address of the restaurant or pictures of the dishes they serve so that the site attracts customers. All this is done by using front-end technologies.
Front-end languages
There are three primary languages:
In addition to these basic languages, there are some additions necessary to build any site, for example, some CSS libraries such as the Bootstrap or Materialize library, some Javascript frameworks such as Angular, Vue, or React (note that React is considered a library), and some CSS plugins as well as SASS or LESS.
Behind the scenes after several months of building the restaurant's website and after the site succeeded well, now customers want to eat the dishes served in the restaurant and wonder if ordering food online is available and some may want to book a table to have dinner with their friends, so you decide to add these features to your site, and this means that the site will deal with product data, purchase, and customer accounts. How will you manage and organize that data in your site? That's where back-end development comes in.
What’s the back-end development?
So far, what you have is an example of a static website whose content doesn't change much. This type of site is good for showcasing things like businesses, restaurants, or business fairs. But if you want to make your site interact with customers, you'll need to know more about what's going on behind the scenes on the site. The back-end is the part you don't see on the site, it is responsible for storing and organizing data and making sure that everything in the site's interface works well. The back-end communicates with the site's interface, sends and receives information, and then displays it on the site. Whenever you fill out a contact form, type a site address, or make a purchase, the browser sends a request to the server, which returns the information written in the form to be able to handle it. Your site needs a database to manage all the information about products and customers. The database stores content in a structure that makes it easy to retrieve, organize, modify, and save data. It runs on an external computer called a server.
There are many widely used databases such as MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Oracle. Now your site should be built with a programming language that the database can recognize. Some of the well-known back-end languages are Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, ASP.Net, and Node.js. These languages are often run in frameworks that are easy to work with and learn, such as Rails, which is a framework for the Ruby language. here comes “Ruby On Rails” which is a popular technology for building dynamic websites that do things faster. By properly working with all these parts, the customer can visit the site and search for a specific type of dish to order for purchase. When they type in the search field (in the Front-end), the site searches all the products stored in the database (in the back-end) and retrieves the appropriate information in the form of a front-end code, so the browser shows the customer's request and makes the purchase or reservation.
