The Difference Between Front End and Back End Development

If you’re not familiar with software development, you might not know the difference between front end and back end development. While it’s okay for the home-based computer user not to know the difference between the two, a business owner or manager needs to be intimately familiar with the differences between front end and back end development. Without this basic knowledge, it will be difficult for you to know if you’re hiring the right developer for your IT needs.

An Explanation of Front End Development

If you’ve ever used a computer or a smartphone to search the Internet, you’ve experienced front end web development. Everything you see in a browser is the product of front end development. Front end development is less about code and more about creating a pleasing user experience with a satisfactory interface.

To put it another way, front end development is responsible for everything that a user sees in their browser or application. A front end developer focuses on the look, feel and design of a website or app. That’s why front end developers are typically well-versed in things like color theory, typography, layouts and grids.

In general, front end developers don’t need to have back end development capabilities. Sometimes referred to as “Javascript developers,” front end developers create static websites that don’t interact with databases. Small businesses and restaurants are often great candidates for front end development projects. HTML, CSS, Javascript and JQuery are some of the languages used in front end development.

A Look at Back End Development

back end developer is often referred to as a “programmer” or “web developer.” This kind of developer focuses on the server side of an application along with the communication between a database and browser. In other words, back end developers are concerned with everything that makes a dynamic website, meaning one that communicates with a database, work seamlessly.

Back end development generally involves three things, a database, a server and an application. Back end developers create code that runs on a server instead of the client. For this reason, a back end developer must know programming languages, databases and server architecture. If an application crashes often, runs slow or is riddled with errors, it’s normally because of issues with back end development.

A lot of back end developers have at least a working knowledge of front end languages like HTML. While that’s the case, they generally work with back end languages, such as Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python and .Net. Back end developers use these languages to create dynamic sites that store information provided by a database.

If you want to see what a dynamic website looks like, you can simply turn to social media or Google. Google Maps, Twitter and Facebook are all good examples of dynamic websites.

Contact Source Web Solutions, Inc.

You don’t need to worry about finding the right kind of developer when you hire Source Web Solutions, Inc. We’ve been doing front end and back end development for businesses located in key markets in the state of Texas since 2003. We invite you to look through some examples of our front and back end development work now. If you have a development project on the horizon, contact us for a quote today.