Web development is not a single activity—it’s an umbrella term for several fields of website creation. The primary forms of web development are client-side(Frontend), server-side(Backend), and full-stack development.
Today, we'd be looking into what backend/server-side development is.
Backend/Server-Side Development
Server-side development is a type of development that involves programs that run on a server. Server-side developers focus on behind-the-scenes development, and server-side development is also referred to as "back-end" development and the word "backend" refers to any part of a website or software program that users do not see in the computer world. This type of programming is important because web browsers, or clients, interact with web servers to retrieve information. Common server-side tasks include:
- Database Creation, Integration and management
- Connecting websites to databases
- Using backend frameworks to build server side applications
- Data validations etc.
An analogy of a backend process
Let’s assume When you click login, from there, the information will be sent to the server-side software through an HTTP Protocol or API which may have some data validations to make sure that the password field wasn’t empty or maybe ".com" was missing from the email.
Once everything is in order, the server-side software will parse this data and send it to the database so then we can check in the database if the user with the email and passwords combination exists and we might just run a query and look for that user.
If the query finds the user, it then can grab the information for that user and send it back to the server.
The user information might be a lot of information we might not need, so the server basically select what we need and then grab the certain information from that and then send back to the client and redirect him to his user profile page.
Technologies/Software in Backend
Ruby, Python, PHP, Node, Java etc
Backend Frameworks
Frameworks are libraries of server side programming languages that construct the backend structure of a website so as to make it easier to write, maintain and scale web applications and they provide us tools and libraries that simplify common web development tasks like routing URLs to appropriate handlers, interacting with databases, supporting sessions and user authorization or just formatting output and improving security against web attacks.
Most popular backend frameworks are: Rails, Django, Flask, ExpressJS etc.
Yeah!! and We'd be stopping there for now.
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