If you’re new to the world of coding and software engineering, you may be confused by terms like the front end, back end, and full-stack development. Your head may swirl at the sight of programming languages like Ruby on Rails and Javascript.

Let’s take a quick poll. Raise your hand if you find yourself asking, “What does it all mean? What’s the difference between front end and back end?” We get it, we were there once too.

First of all, website development is the process of building websites and applications. Unlike UX and UI Design, web development focuses more on coding and making sure a website functions well. It’s essentially the usability aspect of websites and apps. Now, where do terms like front and back end come in? Front-end development and back-end development are the 2 different types of web development.

Let’s dive in and get acquainted with these web development styles!

Before we dive into the differences between back-end vs front-end development, let’s look at a few technicalities about What Is Web Development, and What Types of Web Development.

What Is Web Development?

At its most basic, web development is developing a website for the internet. Web development generally refers to the more non-design aspect of a website, which includes using programming, markup, and scripting languages to create features and functionality. Developers focus on the technical part of building a website, such as constructing the layout, programming, and integrating applications and graphics.

What Types of Web Development Are There?

Back end, front end, and full-stack web development are three separate career paths that can sometimes feel muddied in the technology space. Put plainly, back-end developers are focused on data, modeling, and the back end of a website. Front-end developers help build what users interact with and see. A full-stack developer does some or all of the above.

Back End Development

Backend developers are primarily focused on how a website works. They write code that focuses on the functionality and logic powering the application they’re working on, and the technology they work on is never directly seen by users. 

The tech of the back end is a combination of servers, applications, and databases.

Responsibilities of backend programmers could involve writing APIs, writing code to interact with a database, creating libraries, working on business processes and data architecture, and much more. It often depends on the specific role and company.

Tools For Back End Development

Nowadays, companies deploy web applications and websites in a range of environments. This becomes convenient with the use of back-end development services.

Back-end development plays a vital part in the software development process by allowing software to run in different environments.

Furthermore, the back-end development technology processes retrieve and transfer every detail submitted by the user in the repositories to the web interface for a better app view. Hence, the back-end serves as a website’s framework and enables sharing of knowledge swiftly.

The back-end of a website contains the logic of an application that performs the scheduled data processing required by each organization, besides conjugating an app’s infrastructure and domain components.

Last, back-end technology adds functionality to every front-end development. The website’s user interface and accessibility will completely depend on how successfully the back-end performs. Therefore, without proper back-end technology, no website will work effortlessly.

Here are the best back-end tools.

PHP

Python

Ruby

Java

Front End Development 

A front-end developer is someone who works on software, like desktop or mobile websites, that users interact with. Specifically, a front-end developer spends time on the side of technology that the user touches and sees.

The front end is also commonly referred to as the client side, or more broadly speaking, the user interface.

While many people use the front end to describe website-related development, it can refer to any software that a user interacts with.

Tools For Front End Development 

As for the markup and programming languages used by front-end developers, their main tools are:

HTML

CSS

JavaScript

The part of a website that the user interacts with directly is termed the front end. It is also referred to as the ‘client side’ of the application. It includes everything that users experience directly: text colors and styles, images, graphs and tables, buttons, colors, and navigation menu.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the languages used for Front End development. The structure, design, behavior, and content of everything seen on browser screens when websites, web applications, or mobile apps are opened up, is implemented by front End developers. Responsiveness and performance are two main objectives of the Front End.

The developer must ensure that the site is responsive i.e. it appears correctly on devices of all sizes no part of the website should behave abnormally irrespective of the size of the screen. 

Full-Stack Development - Combining Both Areas

Full-stack development refers to the development of both front-end and back-end portions of an application. This web development process involves all three-layer- The presentation layer (front end part that deals with the user interface), Business Logic Layer (back end part that deals with data validation), and the Database Layer. It takes care of all the steps from the conception of an idea to the actual finished product.

A Full-Stack Web Developer is a web developer or engineer who works on both the front-end and back-end of a website or application — meaning they can tackle projects that involve databases, building user-facing websites, or even work with clients during the planning phase of projects. Being a Full-Stack Developer doesn’t mean that you have necessarily mastered everything required to work with the front-end or back-end, but it means that you are able to work on both sides and understand what is going on when building an application.

In fact, full-stack refers to the collection of a series of technologies needed to complete a project. “Stack” refers to a collection of sub-modules. These software sub-modules or components are combined together to achieve the established function while without the need for other modules.

Conclusion

By now, the difference between the front-end and back-end should be more evident, as well as the different activities carried by developers that work on both ends of the wire. In practical terms, the frontend means the browser and the backend, the server, or more recently, the cloud.

If you like user interfaces, are keen on sound design and like the visual aspects of creating apps, then perhaps the frontend is where you want to spend your time as a software developer. The frontend is exciting not only visually, but also from a programming standpoint; you will spend endless hours writing logic that will make your site look and behave the way the designers intended.

If you like to spend your time-solving business problems, writing algorithms, working in the cloud, and creating services and APIs, then the backend is for you.

If you enjoy both and feel equally excited and comfortable with all aspects of web application creation, then a career as a full-stack developer is what you want.

Here are a few helpful posts you might want to read, too:

Best Programming Languages To Learn For Beginners in 2021

FIND THE BEST TEXT EDITOR FOR PROGRAMMING AND WEB DEVELOPMENT

11 skills you need to become a front end developer in 2021

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