From Zero to Hero in Web Development

Do you want to understand the entire web development process? If yes, then you have landed at the right place. This blog will cover the basics of web development with an easy-to-understand example. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to brush up on your skills, this guide will help you with that too. This will also be useful for an experienced developer who only works in large teams and has never had a chance to see the complete picture of the application.

Basically, web development is broadly divided into front-end, back-end, and database components to make it manageable. Most developers work in one particular area. They either get the opportunity to work on the front end or the back end. Some work solely on databases. Because of this, they weren’t able to understand the complete flow. This blog will be useful for all experienced and new developers.

So, let’s start your journey to become a web development hero! 

In this blog, we will take an example from the Proton website. This is just a random example to make things clear. In this example, we’re going to look at how Proton fetches their mail rates from the database and shows them nicely in the front end like this. For new coders, I will also suggest some of the popular programming languages to start learning.

Front-end (User Interface)

The front end is everything you see on a website, like buttons, links, and graphics. When you click on the price tab on the UI, the front end sends a request to the backend server. 

To understand this better, we can see it in the developer console. This is the pricing API call made to their backend server. If you want to learn more about this, please comment. Let’s do a different blog about this. The point here is to see the request to the backend server.

If you are new to coding and looking to develop the front end, You can start learning the following programming languages:

HTML

CSS

Javascript 

All three are needed to make this kind of awesome UI.

Backend

Now the backend server receives these calls and processes them. There is an application programming interface (API) that can look something like this to make these calls.

GET 192.0.2.0:8080/api/v1/mail/pricing

Here we are running a server that has IP 192.0.2.0 and our backend code running on port 8080. We are using the GET HTTP verb to get mail pricing.

In this case, the front end will request the price, and the client will make this call to the database to return the front end showing this price.

New coders can pick any one of these programming languages to get started with backend development.

Java

Python

Javascript 

Golang

Check out the popular programming language if you want to learn more about it. 

In-Demand Programming Languages for 2023: Stay Ahead of the Game

Databases

Databases allow us to work efficiently with a large amount of data. We may want the data to persist even after the machine is turned off. The database can help with this. Databases are efficient at storing and retrieving data when needed.

Databases are broadly divided into two categories: My SQL and No SQL. These categorizations are a means to store data in a different way so that we may retrieve it more quickly and effectively depending on the needs of your application.

For the above example, the backend queries a database for the mail price data, and the database returns data to the backend application, which returns it to the frontend. The beautiful-looking mail price details page in the frontend displays this data. This is how we get the latest price from the mail page.

Database to Learn

MySQL

Cassandra

Mangodb

You can learn any one database to start. Mostly MySQL is best for beginners.

Complete Method for Obtaining Mail Pricing

 After reading this, you might be wondering why we have to divide web development into different categories even though the simple task is to get data from the database. We will cover this in a completely different blog. That is coming soon.

Conclusion

In this blog, we looked at the bigger picture of web development. This will help us understand your existing website. Taking into account other components also aids in the development of a better website.

It is important to remember that learning web development is an ongoing process, and there is always more to learn. We encourage you to continue exploring new technologies and best practices and experimenting with your own projects. The best way to improve as a developer is to keep building and learning.

If got stuck while developing your website, you can always reach out to us at support@blogyourcode.com.

Happy Coding!!!