eli5 What is the difference between “Front End” developers and “Back End” developers?
In: Technology
Front end devs build things that users interact with. A website is a great example; they’ll build the layout, colors, images, and interactive components like the text box I’m typing into right now. But the second I hit comment and submit this answer the back end part comes in.
Back end devs handle the actual data going back and forth between you, the client, and the server (or network of servers that collectively form the back end). So when I submit this comment, the button I press triggers an event that the front end dev programmed. The website will take this comment, parse it into a form the back end can recognize, and send it to the back end. The back end devs responsibility is to take the incoming request, and do everything needed to update the data and send a proper response. In this case, the text of this comment gets saved somewhere and a response goes back saying it was successful. So when you refresh the page another request is sent to the back end for the comments on this thread, the data is retrieved and packaged, and sent back in a form that the website can recognize. Then its the front end’s responsibility to take that data and make it look all nice for you to read and scroll through, all that good stuff.
So back end devs handle requests of varying kinds to create, read, update, or delete data, and front end devs make it possible for a user to do things with that data with a user interface of some kind.
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