Who is a Front-end/Back-end/Full-stack Developer?

Scrollable Page ...
front-back-fullstack-development

Introduction

When you are dealing with a website project, a lot of times you may hear the phrases such as Front-end, Back-end, or Full-stack development. But what exactly do they mean and which one do you need for your website?

The scope and depth of technologies involved in building a website or web application is so vast and extensive that is almost impossible for a single person to become fully specialized in all of them! Certainly, all those 4-year college degrees in the fields of I.T. and computer science lack miserabbly in equipping the students sufficiently for the job, simply because the technology advances much faster than the publishers' new books being presented in the classrooms!

In its simplest form, a website consists of two types of data. One is the visual data in forms of text, image, video, sounds, etc. that communicate meanings to the user. We call them the front-end of the website, because they are put right in front of the user to see, hear, and interact with.

The other aspect of a website, is what powers up the site to process, compute, prepare and present the date to the user behind the scene in what we call a server. This is the core part of the site and all the business logic happens there.


What Websites Need Back-end Development?

Static sites that do not change over time and require minimum input from users are the ones that are very much geared towards the front-end development. However, if there are many requirements to get various types of input/data from users such as asking them to fill-out forms, choose options, make purchases, etc. are back-end heavy websites.


How is a Front-end Developer Different From a Back-end Developer?

As mentioned above, the front-end of a website refers to all the visual/sensory data presented to usres inside the web browser. Frontend developers are professionals who are responsible for effectively implementing visual components on a website. They perform front-end development tasks like website designing, appearance, navigation, buttons.
The main objective of designing any website is to ensure that users can see the relevant information in a format that is easy to read. But this simple goal is complicated to implement as visitors use various types of devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. They also need to ensure that the website opens correctly in various browsers and different operating systems (cross-platform). This forces the Front-end developer to test their design on multiple permutations of OS, Browser, and Devices, making their job difficult.
Front-end Developers use HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (Cascading Style sheets) to ensure that the website looks appealing and runs correctly. It also allows users to interact freely and comfortably with a website.
From the other hand, Back-end developers are the experts who build and maintain the mechanisms that process data and perform actions on websites. Unlike front-end developers, who control everything you can see on a website, back-end developers are involved in data storage, security, and other server-side functions that you cannot see.


Who is a Full-stack developer?

As pointed out at the intro of this blog-post, the technologies involved in creating websites advance rapidly, so much that it is almost impossible for a person to catch up with every single one of them, let alone claim full proficiency over all of them! If that's true, who are full-stck developers and how come we have them around!?
A Full Stack Developer is someone who works with the Back End — or server side — of the application as well as the Front End, or client side. In other words, a Full Stack Developer is associated with the creation of an application from its start to finish. He designs the front-end and the backend of an application while ensuring its efficiency, reliability, and other crucial features.

Here is the catch, a good and experienced programmer can have multiple skills under his belt to enable him address both the front and the back end side of a project. But such highly skilled developers need to constantly keep themselves updated with the changes/trends in both domains and sooner or later, they will need to choose which side of the coin they prefer to focus-on.

That's it people for another blog post from Surpass Web Development. As to my set of skills, I am a full-stack developer with huge passion and interest in back-end development, specifically using PHP and Symfony framework.
If you have any project in mind, I will be happy to help you with that. Please Contact me or just go ahead with RFQ form. - Have a good day!



By: SurpassAdmin
Posted on Oct. 18, 2022