Backend Web Development

Backend web development is one of the most essential and critical parts of web development. It is a very important part to power your website and giving it a purpose.

Thus, if you want to develop a meaningful and useful web application, learning the different dynamics of backend web development is important.

To make it easy for you, we have compiled this article to answer the following questions:

• What exactly is backend development?

• What is the difference between backend and frontend development?

• And what are some popular backend development languages?

So, keep reading the article to make your understanding of the backend sound.

What is Backend Development?

Before jumping into defining the backend web  development. It is important too, first, to understand what is backend in web development is.

In very simple terms, Backend can be defined as the part of the code which lets it operate.

This code is the most important part which makes an application operate. And it is not accessible by the end-users.

This code normally resides on the server. So, the term "backend development" refers to the development of the server-side logic of a web application.

This includes all the code required to build out the database,  application, and other development processes.

Difference Between Backend and Frontend Web Development:

If you want to learn about the server-side comprehensively, you have to understand the front end also. Moreover, it is also important to learn how these two sides of the web application interact with each other.

In very simple words, the Frontend of a web application is the part of the application that is visible to the end-user. It carries all the visible parts of the application which is the output of all the code written in the backend.

For example, take the look at a car. A driver does not know how the tires are rotating, and how the engine is working. But they have access to only the steering, brakes, and accelerator.

In this example, the whole technical part is the backend. And other components accessible to the driver are part of the frontend.

Moreover, it is important to note that this abstraction and object-oriented programming has improved over time. In these 10 to 15 years, JavaScript has played important role in this.

When a website is loaded from the server, the front end, the client-side, script runs on the site and takes requests. These requests are processed independently without interacting with the server.

However, when a request is made that is related to the database, these requests are forwarded to the backend using JavaScript and AJAX.

The backend script runs in this case and processes the requests. Fetches whatever the request is about and sends it back to the user.

On the other hand, libraries and different frameworks make up the server-side logic of the application. There exists a stack of the backend in which database, server, frameworks, and OS resides.

Different Backend Languages:

We have developed a comparatively better understanding of backend web development. So, now is the time to get into different backend programming languages.

There exist several programming languages that one can choose from as per requirements. Their usage depends on the efficiency, lines of code required, performance, compatibility, etc.

So, let’s look into several backend programming languages briefly.

C++:

C++ is one of the widely used programming languages. It is a very low-level programming language as compared to other languages.

It combines all the features of C with OOP, which works on the class system. Since it is a low-level programming language, so it can interact with the hardware efficiently.

This quality makes it a go-to choice for developing large-scale applications and video games.

C#:

If you are planning to develop a website that relates to the Microsoft or Windows server, C# can be your choice.

It works almost perfectly well with Microsoft products like ASP.NET. Other than that, it is a popular programming language among developers who are addicted to Java or C++. 

JavaScript ( Node.js):

JavaScript is normally known as a front-end language. But the introduction of the Node framework has shown the world that it can also be very helpful for the back-end as well. Other frameworks like Angular are popular among front-end frameworks.

Scala:

Scala is one of the programming languages that support both object-oriented and functional programming paradigms. However, it is based on Java which means that it is powered by JVM and is compatible with Java.

 Python:

 Python is another example of a general-purpose programming language. It supports a wide and impressive library for data processing. One of the major benefits of using Python is that it is a very human-understandable language. So, it becomes easy for the programmers to write server-side logic in complex web applications.