Front End VS Back End
By: Alireza Azari
Tags: Backend, Programming, Web Development, Front End Development, Web Design

If you are new to web development, you have probably heard a lot about frontend and backend. But what exactly does it mean? If you are a beginner in this field, it is difficult to know about them and what each one covers.

In this article, I want to explain these two concepts in the simplest possible way.

The frontend and backend developers are clearly distinguished from each other and are like two sides of the same coin. The function of the website is to trust each party it communicates with and to act effectively as a single entity with the other party. Is one more important than the other? No. Both play a very important role in web development.

Front End

A website’s front-end means everything you see on a website that interacts with your browser. Also known as the “client-side”, it includes everything the user directly experiences: from text and colors to buttons, photos, and menus.

For example, suppose you have a company, so you need a professional website to introduce your company and position to customers. You may have some photos and some information about your products. You need all the front-end technologies to build your website.

These three languages ​​together can do the above for us:

HTML: This is a basic language that creates and organizes web content and is displayed by a browser.

CSS: A language with HTML that defines the content style of a website such as a layout, color, fonts, etc.

JavaScript: This programming language is mostly used for interactive elements such as drop-down menus, contact forms, and windows that open modally.

Having all these requirements together will create all the visuals when visiting the website — for example, shopping online, reading the news, checking email, or Google search.

Web developer VS Web Designer

It is important to note that although frontend developers deal with the visual and interactive side of a website, they cannot be considered as web designers.

Frontend developers do not actually design these front-facing aspects of a website; This is the specialty of a web designer or, more specifically, a UI designer. The frontend developer takes this design and builds functionalities using the frontend languages ​​we talked about above.

So web designers are concerned with design: the look and feel of the website, how it is positioned, and what buttons and touchpoints the user experiences. Frontend developers are dealing with features; In fact, Front-end developers are the engineers who turn these designs into a live interactive website.

Back End

Let’s get back to our example, after a while, your business website looks great, and your company is extremely successful. Customers now want to buy from your company for their friends, and such questions begin as to whether they can order online.

So you decide to open an online store where people can buy and order whenever they want. This means that your site should now store product information, purchases, user profiles, credit cards, and more. How do you manage this data? This is where backend development comes into play.

Back End programming is about coding and programming anything that the user does not see and is related to the behind-the-scenes work of the website. For example, when a website receives articles from a database, it is a matter of backend. The job of a backend programmer is to program the things that are the core of a website and the user does not see the code directly.

The back-end is responsible for maintaining and organizing the data and ensuring that everything works on the client-side. The backend communicates with the front-end, sending and receiving information to be displayed as a web page. Each time you fill out a contact form, type in a web address or make a purchase (any user interaction on the client-side), your browser sends a request to the server, which encodes the information in the form returns the frontend that the browser is able to interpret and display.

Your website needs a database to manage all customer and product information. A database stores website content in a structure that makes it easy to retrieve, organize, edit, and store information. It runs on a remote computer called a server. There are several widely used databases, such as MySQL, SQL Server, PostgresSQL, and Oracle

Your application still has frontend code, it must also be built using a language that a database can recognize. Some common backend languages ​​are Ruby, PHP, Java, .Net, and Python. These programming languages ​​often run on frameworks that simplify the web development process. Rails, for example, is a framework written in Ruby. Ruby on Rails is a popular technology for building dynamic web applications that speed up the process.

Suppose you enter a theater to watch a theater. All those who act on the stage and the audience sees them, we can consider them as Front End actors of a theater performance.

And all those who work behind the scenes, such as a costume designer, director, writer, producer and… who are not seen by the audience, but work behind the scenes and their work affects the performance, can be called Back End actors of theater performance.

The same is true on the web. Everything the user sees on their monitor screen is related to the Front End, and everything that runs behind the scenes is related to the Back End.