Introduction to Web Development
What is Web Development?
Web Development is the process of building a website and deploying it on the world wide web.
Any website can probably be divided into Front-End and Back-End. These are very crucial terms in web development but are very different from each other!
Front-End: The Front-E nd is what users interact with It is also referred to as the ‘client side’ of the application. The front-end of the website is built with tools like HTML, CSS, the React Library etc.
Back-End: The backend stores and arranges data. It is also referred to as the ‘server-side’ of the website where it stores and arranges data, and also makes sure that everything on the client-side of the website works the way it is supposed to. Unlike the front-end, users cannot see or interact with the backend. The back-end of the website is built with tools like Django, NodeJS
How do frontend and Backend interact with each other?
By using APIs
API stands for Application Programming Interface. An API can be compared to something like a business contract. When one party gets into an agreement with another party, a contract is drawn . Similarly, an API is like a contract between the front end and the backend. . Just like a contract is drawn-up before the two parties interact, an API is designed before the frontend and the backend. APIs are designed to expose a predefined set of capabilities of the backend systems in order to inform the frontend applications about them.
This is a simple python script to extract images from NASA API.
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a standard text-based format for representing structured data based on JavaScript object syntax
URL
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is nothing more than the address of a given unique resource on the Web.
A URL for HTTP (or HTTPS) is normally made up of three or four components:
- Scheme/Protocol: A scheme identifies the protocol to be used to access a resource on the Internet. The protocol can be HTTP (without SSL) or HTTPS (with SSL).
- Host: The host name identifies the host that holds the resource. www.example.com is an example of a host name. A server provides services in the name of the host, but hosts and servers do not have a one-to-one mapping. Hostnames can also be followed by a port number. Well-known port numbers for service are normally omitted from the URL. Most servers use the well-known port numbers for HTTP and HTTPS, so most HTTP URLs omit the port number.
- Path:The path identifies the specific resource in the host that the web client wants to access. For example, /software/htp/cics/index.html.
- Query string: If a query string is used, it follows the path component, and provides a string of information that the resource can use for some purpose.
The scheme and host components of a URL are not case-sensitive, but the path and query string are case-sensitive. Typically, the whole URL is specified in lowercase.
The components of the URL are combined and delimited as follows:
scheme://host:port/path?query
DNS
What is a domain name?
All of the site names that you know, for example, google.com, youtube.com, cambridge.org, thetimes.co.uk, are domain names. Domain names are used to identify the IP addresses of the website.
Several domains are hosted on an IP address and IP address is a set of unique characters that are used to identify a device using Internet Protocol.
So glad you made it to the end 🥳
We hope this blog was useful for you guys. We’ve linked a few resources down below that will help you guys in tandem with the blog content. Feel free to contact us to get your doubts cleared. Now go build things that matter :)
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