If you aspire to be a website developer, you must understand the rules and techniques that every other developer should know. In order to make a website look good and function the way you want it to, you need to be familiar with the technologies and things related to website development that will help you achieve your goals.
Developing an application or website is usually done by knowing the 3 main programming languages: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. And as complicated as it may sound, once you know what you’re doing, understanding web technologies and how they work becomes much easier. We give you an introduction to the latest web technologies and stuff in the hopes that it will make things easier for you.
Table of Contents
1 Become a Website Developer with the Right Technology
2 1. Browser
3 2. HTML & CSS
4 3. Web Development Frameworks
4.1 Angular
4.2 Ruby on Rails
4.3 YII
4.4 Meteor JS
4.5 Express.js
4.6 Zend
4.7 Django
4.8 Laravel
5 4. Programming Language
6 5. Protocol
7 6. API
8 7. Data Format
9 8. Client (Client-side)
10 9. Server (Server-side)
Become a Website Developer with the Right Technology
You may have heard the term “website development technology” before, but have you ever thought about what it actually means? Since computers can’t communicate with each other the way people do, they need code. Web technologies are languages and multimedia packages that computers use to execute commands.
1. Browsers
The browser or browser will collect the information and then present it to those who need it in an easy-to-understand way. The analogy of a browser that will display our content to those who are looking for related information. Here’s a list of the most popular browsers:
Google Chrome – Currently, the most popular browser brought to you by Google
Safari – Apple web browser
Firefox – Open source browser supported by Mozilla Foundation
Internet Explorer – Microsoft browser
2. HTML & CSS
HTML is one of the first things you should learn. Thanks to HTML, web browsers know what to display once they receive a request. If you want to better understand how HTML works, you also need to know what CSS is.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and describes how HTML elements are displayed on the screen. If you browse through enough tutorials, you’ll soon be creating CSS text effects, page transitions, image hover effects, and more.
3. Web Development Frameworks
Web development frameworks are the starting point of technology or things that you as a website developer can use to do simple or mundane tasks and do the job right.
Angular
Angular is one of the latest web technologies specially designed for developing dynamic web applications. With this framework, you can easily create front-end-based applications without the need to use other frameworks or plugins.
Its features include well-crafted templates, MVC architecture, code generation, code splitting etc. All expressions are like code snippets enclosed in curly braces and do not use loops or conditional statements.
If you want to start using Angular or just evaluate whether this framework will be the right solution for your project, you can check out this 3-hour training, published in June 2019 by Justin Schwartzenberger, a Google Developer Expert. This course covers everything needed to get started with Angular, from the basic architecture, working with the DOM, data binding, routing, and components, to more advanced topics like directives and pipes.
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is a server-side website technology that makes application development easier and faster. What really sets this framework apart is the code reuse as well as some other cool features that will help you get the job done in no time.
Examples of popular websites written in Ruby are Basecamp, and Ask.FM, GitHub, 500px, and many others.
If you’re interested in more in-depth training on the Ruby on Rails framework, a 10-hour course by Kevin Skoglund, a senior Ruby developer, might be a great place to start. It covers a complete learning cycle from very basic to more advanced topics such as Layout, Partials, and View Helpers, providing several practical tasks in parallel.
YII
Yii is an open-source web application development framework built on PHP5. It is performance-optimized and comes with a number of great tools for debugging and testing applications. Another plus is that it is very simple and easy to use.
Meteor JS
Meteor JS is written in Node.js and allows you to build web applications in real time for multiple platforms. This framework for creating simple websites for personal use is really made easy with Meteor JS.
It is an open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework which also means that web page loading times are significantly shorter. The JavaScript Stack also makes it possible to get the same result with fewer lines of code than usual.
Here’s an online video course providing an interesting practical example of combining MeteorJS and React to build a web application.
Express.js
Developed on Node.js, Express.js is a great web application development network for those who need to develop applications and APIs as quickly as possible. Many great features are provided with the help of plugins, and this is very helpful for you website developers.
The advanced use of Express.js can be combined with MongoDB and Mongoose and demonstrates different ways of deploying Express applications and running them in production.
Zend
Zend is an open-source framework based on PHP, focused on building more secure and reliable web applications and services. It is one of the enterprise-level MVC frameworks, which came before current superhits like Laravel or Symfony, and many popular PHP engines like Magento are built on Zend.
Zend is currently still in active development, and while it may be less popular than its sibling, it’s a great solution for large-scale PHP applications.
Django
Django is one of the most popular frameworks written in Python and follows the MVC architecture. It makes the application development process much easier thanks to its simplicity.
Django greatly simplifies using Python and provides many tools that make a web application developer’s life easier – e.g. ORM, Models, Django admin, templates, etc.
This 1.5-hour video course can help any developer, even a novice, to start developing Python/Django applications in a few days.
Laravel
Laravel is an ideal PHP development framework for small websites. It comes with a number of useful features including MVC support, object-oriented libraries, Artisan, authorization techniques, database migration, etc.
Today, it is one of the most community-supported and community-developed frameworks, and given that PHP has one of the largest communities out there, Laravel is a great tool for powering small websites and large-scale B2B web applications that manage millions of transactions every day.
4. Programming Language
As we explained earlier, because computers don’t use a language similar to human language, they need a different way of communicating. Here are some of the most popular programming languages:
Javascript – used by all web browsers, Meteor and many other frameworks
CoffeeScript – “dialect” of JavaScript. It was seen as simpler but converted back to JavaScript
Python – used by the Django framework as well as in most mathematical calculations
Ruby – used by the Ruby on Rails framework
PHP – used by WordPress to create the WYSIWYG editor that everyone uses today. It is also used by Facebook, Wikipedia, and other major sites
Go – a newer language, built for speed Swift – Apple’s newest programming language
Java – used by Android and many desktop applications.
5. Protocol
As a website developer, you must also understand the protocol. Instructions on how to pass information back and forth between a computer and a device are commonly known as protocols.
Thanks to this protocol, any website can access the browser. The protocol requests a website from Google’s servers and then receives a response with the website’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Uses web sockets to establish a consistent connection between the client and the server. As a result, you get website updates in real time without having to refresh your browser.
Mostly used for APIs, this protocol has standard methods such as GET, POST, and PUT that allow the exchange of information between applications.
6. API
An API (application programming interface) allows other developers to use some of the app’s functionality without sharing code.
The goal of developers while API is to be able to control access with API keys. Examples of well-crafted APIs are those created by Facebook, Twitter, and Google for their web services.
7. Data Format
Data is stored in structures called data formats.
JSON – or JavaScript Object Notation abbreviations a syntax for storing and exchanging data (like XML). It is currently the most popular data format out there.
XML – Mostly used by Microsoft systems, used to be the most popular data format
CSV – is data formatted with commas; e.g. Excel data
8. Client (Client-side)
Each application user is called a client. Clients can be computers, mobile devices, tablets, etc. Typically, multiple clients interact with the same application that is stored on the server.
9. Server (Server-side)
Application code is usually stored on the server. The client makes a request to the server. The server then responds to the request after gathering the requested information.