Welcome to Insiders’ Viewpoints: Front-end and Back-end Web Development In this video, we will listen to several web development professionals discuss front-end and back-end web development. Can you talk about front-end and back-end development and describe some of the languages, IDEs, tools, and frameworks you commonly use for each? Front-end development or client-side programming is what happens in the browser. It is everything that the user sees and interacts with. Some of the languages we use for front-end development are HTML, CSS, JavaScript. We use framework and libraries like AngularJS, react, and jQuery, Backbone js, etc. Back-end development or server side programming happens on server and database. It enables the front-end user experience. We use back-end languages like Python, Java, Node js, JavaScript. Some of the back-end framework used are Django, Rails, Spring, etc. Front end traditionally means working on things that the user can see the user can touch and have a direct interaction with. All right. So, this could be the design of your application or your website, the way the different buttons are placed. It could also be how the user interacts. So, clicking, for example, could be one, use case of a front-end development and design. Back end, on the other hand, support your front end, right. So back end is developing services that enable user to perform that function, but the user does not directly interact with. So, for example, if you're building a retail application, the front-end could be the shopping cart, and clicking on the little button to add something into your shopping cart. And then the back end would be processing that. It could be processing your credit card, it could be invoicing, it could be shipment, or actually shipping the product to the end user. All of the services that enable that go into the back end. Our team uses a lot of Ruby on Rails mix with some Vue.js. Some of our newer projects, we're moving to Elixir and Phoenix. We also have a lot of services written in node JS. And some of them use TypeScript as well. We also have a lot of Python code written with Django and Flask. I started off with front-end development and quickly got into the back-end, so that I could write the full stack and quickly also became interested in the infrastructure underlying it. I started off using atom. And then I quickly after getting more into the cloud, wanting to have more integrations, like AWS toolkit, and terraform, plugins, and cloud formation linters tools that helped me format my code in an intelligent way. So, VS code is the tool I've been using to write my cloud formation templates and terraform templates and Python scripts in the past, so, and now. In terms of different frameworks for the front end, I traditionally rely on HTML, CSS, obviously, to create and style the front-end application. I also use frameworks like Bootstrap that make it a little bit easier to create some of the more complicated design structures. For the backend I, for the most part, focus on JavaScript or Python, I use Node JS and express JS extensively. I also use Python frameworks like Flask and Django, when working with... when creating services on the backend. Since I'm a cloud native developer, I also use Cloud Functions, which is the serverless platform on the IBM Cloud quite a bit. I am generally doing back-end development, but I do dabble in front-end and touch some front-end code from time to time. For both, I use VS code to pretty much do all of my development. Although if I'm logged into a server, I can use VI or nano for a terminal experience. For my front-end development, I'll use often the same languages like Ruby or JavaScript. But sometimes there is a little bit of derivation, or I have to learn a specific templating language. And there are a number: Handlebars, Jinja, and so on and so forth. And honestly, I Google it every single time. And that goes the same with front-end frameworks. There is a number of them. There's a lot to them. So generally, learn the basics and dig when you need to dig.
