Hi everyone,
I am programming since quite some years now.
Until now I was mainly focused on writing "normal" applications which run inside a console or with a GUI, sometimes also applications which interact with hardware components such as sensors / actors / ...
During this time I got to know a lot of cool programming principles and tools such as object orientation, modularization, unit-testing, test-driven-development, desing-patterns, code-analysis, ..
Also I have some first experience with hosting a wordpress blog, running static web-sites on a nginx webserver, and writing some small php-forms. But I feel like there is still too much magic in all these web-development topics. And I would like to fill this gap and learn a bit more about all these connected scripting / programming languages and technologies. (Because I hate, when I don't understand how things are working 😃 😃 )
I started with some online "Web-development bootcamp" course at udemy to get a rough overview. This took quite some days now and I think HTML, CSS and Javascript for DOM manipulation / animations are clear to me now. Also I heard a lot about NodeJS and all it's derivate languages and databases like Mongo-DB. But still I feel like there is a lot of things unclear to me.
To get to a better understanding I wanted to development some small web-application. Nothing very special, just some website where you have to login to, are able to generate some data and this data is then persisted into a database and once you login again you are able to see the data again.
I first started with developing some classes in Javascript to represent the data in the browser while you are logged in. But I very soon realized that the Javascript which can run inside the browser is very limited and already for unit-testing and modularization into separate files that include each other I actually needed to do some crazy work-arounds or use other server-side languages like nodejs / php / ... .
After some time coding I decided to take one step back, trying to understand the basic design patterns of web-applications and not running for a long time into the wrong direction.
My questions are:
- Is there some typical way to go while developing web-applications?
- What are the typical key players? I know there is the difference between front-end, back-end and databases.
- But are there some do's and don't's that good WebDev's follow?
For example:
- which code is usually written in back-end / server-side languages?
- What is usually done in the front-end? (Only desing and animations?)
- Do I have to move all business logic into the back-end, also for security reasons or is this maybe also a bad idea because of peformance reasons?
- What programming languages are more or less dead and not to be used in the future?
- What things are typically reused from frameworks, for example authentication and session handling?
Also I felt like some things I know from other programming languages are not so easy in languages like javascript / nodejs. I am willing to spend time and effort into learning all these things but I would also like to keep the quality standards that I know from C++ /
Python. On the other side I also wondered if these patterns that I have in my head are maybe just boundaries that are completely useless in modern web-development? (e.g. typing, object orientation, modularization / splitting the code to be very reusable )
What do you think am I on the wrong track here, or do I maybe simply use the wrong languages?
I hope the long text is not knocking everyone down / keeping everyone from answering me :o
I would really appreciate your help and guidance to understand everything a bit better and to not repeat the things already a lot of others have done wrong 😉
BR, mezorian
