What is Web Development!

What is Web Development Anyway? We Break It Down For You!

Web development is one of the fastest-growing occupations in the early 21st century.  The term web developer is used ubiquitously throughout the tech industry, yet unsurprisingly — to those not already a part of the development community — it isn’t always clear what web development is or what a web developer does.

 To answer these questions effectively we must first delve a tiny bit into the realm of websites themselves: How a website recognizes when a user visits the site and performs the necessary function to display the appropriate page to the user.

While every website is built slightly differently, there are a few fundamental components that handle every interaction between a user and the site:

• Client: The local computer (desktop/laptop) or device (phone/tablet) the user is interacting with to access the website.
• Server: The remote computer that “physically houses” all the files (and thus code) that make up the website.
• Database: A sub-component of the remote server, the database is a large series of data tables used to store all the dynamic information generated or used within the website.  For example, the account information of a logged in user would be stored in the database.

With our three fundamental components identified, we can briefly examine how a website recognizes a visiting user and ultimately displays the appropriate page for viewing.  The following diagram provides an approximate illustration of the process.

1. Jenny first enters the URL of the website (google.com) in the browser on her local computer (the client).
2. Jenny’s computer generates a request that is sent out to the server computer, which then accepts the request.
3. The server runs (or executes) the back-end code, usually grabbing data from (or querying) the database.
4. The database sends the requested data back to the server.
5. The server takes the data and executes the front-end code to produce a response.
6. This response is sent back out to the client where it is then displayed (or rendered) on the client computer as a standard web page.