What is Full-Stack Development?

• By -Leo Gerald Bernabe

What is Full-Stack Development?

• Posted on November 1, 2019
• Posted in Blog
• 1 Comment

Introduction

The full-stack development is a software development structure for web, mobile or desktop applications. And the goal of it is to develop an enterprise application that can easily maintain, manage and organize by developers.

This Full-Stack development is divided into two layers, which is Front-end and Back-end development layers. There are other terms for this development layers, front-end which client-side, and back-end which is server-side.

Additionally, full-stack development requires a lot of developers to do parallel stuff to complete the application in a faster way. However, the average developer can only work in a single layer. For example, some developers can only handle back-end development, but they can’t handle the front-end development.

Sometimes a small project or small company has a lack of resources, meaning some developers force to do front-end and back-end tasks. For example, the front-end developer needs assistance in the back-end application. But the back-end developer who handles that application is having a leave or not available at that time. So the front-end developer should wait for another day if he/she doesn’t know how to handle the back-end application. However, it can cost time or money for a particular project.

Front-end

The Front-end is referring to the operations that can be seen and performed by the client. For example, the thing you can see in a web application like contents, titles, fields, button, etc.. And for the things you can do like navigating to another page, saving your information, and more.

Back-end

The back-end is the core of the whole application. And it contains the logical part and sensitive data of the application. Therefore, user are not allow to operate direct to this application. Because everything in working on this application is unseen by the application’s user. However, the functions of the back-end application can only perform thru the front-end application.

Front-end and Back-end Interaction

• The HTTP Request is a binary data that contains information which send by the client-side. Therefore, the client-side and the server-side uses HTTP Request and Network to communicate with each other.
• The HTTP Response is a response made by the server-side to send some information(reply) back to the client-side.
• The network is the connection between the client-side and the server-side. Meaning to allow the computer to communicate to other computers, and to allow the sharing of data.
• The database is a collection of information that used to organize, store and manage the data of the system.

1. The client-side app can be accessed through a browser using a computer or mobile devices, once the app running on the browser, the client can now proceed to any transaction using the app, e. g. login request, in the above screenshot after filling up and clicking the Login button the app will throw it as HTTP Request to the Network.
2. The Network used to connect the client-side to the server-side, once the HTTP Request pass through the Network, it will throw the request to the Server-side.
3. After the Server-side app received the request, it will process the request, if the request needed data or information from the database(e. g. checking if the client’s credentials are existing in the database), the app will connect to the database to fetch data.
4. After the server-side successfully fetched and retrieved the data from the database, it will send the requested data to the network as HTTP Response.
5. The client-side app will display the HTTP Response to the browser as a result(e. g. the Client-side displays the login request results messages like “access granted”, “valid username and password” ).

How to become a full-stack developer?

Becoming a full-stack developer is not easy, and reading articles and books is not an easy way either. However, there are some easy ways you can try to become a full-stack developer.

The most straightforward and easiest way is to learn how to build an application alone. If you make a whole application alone, you will enforce yourself to fasten your learning process. Therefore you might encounter some circumstances that may have a good impact on your learning. For example, back-end application needs to connect in a database application, you can learn that by creating a real project with user registration, user login, and more.

You can refer to the post below, for the other tips to become a full-stack developer: