Software Engineering

Hi!

Every application you see has two integral parts - The Frontend and the Backend. When a visitor comes to the website, what they see is the Front End. Yea! you are right, it is clear from the name right? The front end handles everything you can see and interact with on the application.

Have you ever thought about what happens when you click a button, fill out a form in an application or add an item to the cart on an e-commerce application? The entire process of how this works, why you can come back the next day and you can find the items in your cart is because there has to be someone behind the scene doing the dirty work. Someone memorizes your cart items so that even when you are back in 3 months or more, you can still find these items. This is the intriguing work of the Backend. So the Backend is responsible for processes and computations that happens behind the scene. See an image below to illustrate this:

image credit: comic.browserling.com

Ops! Backend looks scary? Not exactly. The image is just to let you see that the Front End part is what users see, users do not interact with the Backend.

The Backend handles all the complex, abstract tasks (like how you get to see how many people liked your post on Facebook), organization and storage of data.

In more technical terms (I promise not too technical), the Frontend of an application is referred to as the client side while the Backend of an application is called the server side.

Up next!

• Backend or Frontend which is better?

• Backend Road Map

• Application Programming Interface Explained in simple terms

More Advanced Concepts

• Getting started with deploying a NodeJs application on Amazon ECS (Series)

• Backend Performance optimization, common practices.