Web development is the process of creating web applications, which involves designing the website's appearance, implementing its functionalities, deploying the application to the internet, and optimizing and scaling it to ensure optimal performance and reliability.
And this course is all about building web applications. Whether you are a complete beginner or someone with programming foundations, you've come to the right place.
Together, we are going to cover everything you need to know to become a web developer, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, databases, as well as frameworks such as Express.js and React.js, and so on.
Is web development dying with AI?
But, before getting into the technical details, we must address a very important question: With all the hype surrounding AI, is web development dying?
The short answer is no, and here's why:
AI is a tool, not a replacement. Web development remains one of the most in demand career paths, as every business and organizations nowadays needs a website to broaden their online presence. While AI enhances efficiency in creating websites by automating repetitive tasks, it does not eliminate the need for skilled developers to design, build, and maintain them.
AI tools such as website builders and code assistants helps developers automate repetitive tasks, suggest code, or even generate simple code snippets. However, they lack the creativity, problem-solving skills required to develop complex, scalable, and user-centric applications.
Also, coding is a huge part of web development, but web development isn't just about coding. A huge part of web development is about involves understanding user needs, creating designs with good user experience, ensuring seamless functionality, and create applications that can scale when necessary. These are tasks that require human insight and expertise.
As developers, we should see AI as an opportunity, not a threat. It’s a powerful tool that can augment our capabilities, allowing us to focus more on innovation and problem-solving while leaving the repetitive tasks to automation.
What is a web application
A web application is a software application that is hosted on a remote server, and can be accessed on the internet using a web browser. Unlike traditional desktop or mobile applications, web apps do not need to be installed on a user's device and can be used across various platforms and devices.
The frontend
A web application consists of the frontend and the backend.
The frontend is what users can see through their browser. For example, when you type a URL in your browser and hit Enter, you will see a webpage. That webpage is the frontend, created with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), and usually a bit of JavaScript.
HTML defines the content displayed on the webpage, CSS controls the appearance and layout of the HTML components, and JavaScript introduces interactivity and makes the webpage dynamic.
Most HTML elements have an opening tag and a closing tag. The name of the tag specifies the element type, and you can add additional information by assigning extra attributes.
CSS is used to define the appearance of HTML elements. It is made of a selector and a set of style rules in key/value pairs. In the above example, CSS will select all <p> elements, and apply the style rule color: red;.
Sometimes, you might want to add more interactivity to your webpage, such as a pop-up menu or an image that zooms in when clicked. That's where JavaScript shines. As a demonstration, the following example is a square that moves back and forth when the corresponding button is clicked.
Open demo in new tabThe backend
If a web application only delivers fixed webpages defined by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it is called a static web application. But imagine you are building an app with hundreds or even thousands of pages. Making so many static pages would be tedious, and your app would be impossible to maintain in the future.
Instead, you can store the data inside a database, which can easily and safely store millions of records, and then create a backend application in charge of retrieving information from the database, generating static pages based on the retrieved data, and finally serving the generated pages to the user. Such applications are referred to as dynamic web applications.
The backend part of a web application usually consists of a database for storing and managing data. Among the various types of databases, relational databases are the most commonly used. These databases organize data into structured tables with predefined schemas, making it easy to query and manipulate data.
Besides a database, you also need a program that can retrieve the correct data from the database based on the user request, compile the data into a proper webpage based on a template, and then transfer the webpage to the end user.
The program can be written in many different languages, such as JavaScript, Python, PHP, Java, and more. For this course, we are going with JavaScript, as it is the only one that works in both the frontend and the backend.
In the future, we will add more chapters on other programming languages and frameworks, such as PHP (Laravel) and Python (Django). Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss any future updates.
The architecture we demonstrated above isn't without its issues. For instance, because compiling the webpage will consume a lot of server resources, if your web application receives a large number of requests in a very short period of time, it might put too much pressure on the server.
In recent years, a new type of web application has gained more popularity. It is called a single-page application (SPA).
Instead of compiling the webpage, the server will transfer the data directly, usually in JSON format. Then, a separate frontend application will receive the data and render the webpage on the client side, which generally has more excessive computing power.
You should know that SPA is not a replacement for the traditional architecture, sometimes a webpage should be rendered on the server side to avoid leaking sensitive information.
We are running a discount! Everything is 50% off!
Currently, our course is under rapid development. So far, we have published the HTML & CSS, JavaScript, and the React.js chapters. In the next few months, we are also going to publish Next.js, Vue.js and Nuxt.js tutorials.
We are running a discount until that happens. Get them before the price changes!