Web Development Quick Overview

Forbes estimates that there are 1.13 billion websites as at 2023. If they are this popular, having the skills to develop one or understanding how they work will be a valuable skill to have. Web sites development is the art of using web technologies or tools to build websites. Building websites have a lot to share in common with building houses. So let's use building as an analogy for a quick review of common terminologies in web development.

To begin, just like buildings have designs and blueprints, one can think of HyperText Markup Language or HTML as the blue prints of websites. HTML like building designs have a predefined structure and so most web browsers can use these known designs to display their content in a smooth manner. And similarly, just like most buildings are incomplete without decorations, Cascading Style Sheet(CSS) contains all the decorative ideas like font, text color, and background color that can be used to style your websites. Bootstrap is an open source CSS files that allows your decorations to be customized depending on the device used to access the content on your websites. This customizations is often referred to as media responsiveness. Other means of achieving responsiveness are setting appropriately your display using flexbox, grid, or media-query in your CSS files. Head of the mobile house? JavaScript is what makes your websites literally "move" or make it dynamic. Also, just like you can access different rooms with a key, a document object model is what enables your different HTML files to be accessed so they can be changed or displayed. These are the visible aspect of our websites design and are often referred to as Frontend development. React.js is a very popular open source frontend JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

That is with what is visible from the outside. Behind the scene activities are referred to as Backend development. Common examples of backend activities are authentication, database retrieval, information processing, etc. There are frameworks that are used for backend development. Common examples are Django, Flask, ASP.NET, Express, Node.js, etc. Node.js is a popular framework and can be used for both front and backend development. Node.js uses Express to build web pages.

Again to continue our building analogy, just like buildings have doors and windows to allow air and to pass in and out objects, Application Programming Interface(API) is the door and window equivalent of websites. One can retrieve data and pass data to our websites using the API. RESTful is the guidelines that stipulates how this doors and windows can be used to access and deposit data from and to our websites using this API. Also same as most buildings have some form of storage, database is the storage room equivalent of websites. Traditionally, databases were accessed using SQL approach but there are modern flavors that uses no SQL approach. MongoDB is a very popular no SQL database that is often used as storage room for websites.

Finally, just like there are very diverse buildings such that some may escape a notice if one attempts to count, there are many web development tools that are too many to be covered in a single post. Feel free to drop in the comments section a continuation and what analogy can best describe your tool?