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How to build a web application from scratch 1

How to build a web application from scratch

In today’s fast-paced world, we have many tools, technologies, and frameworks available to us to create our web applications. From languages to frameworks, we have at the very least more than 10 choices. It is possible to have several answers to a single question, and all of them may be valid. The same applies to choosing tools and technologies, and each of them has its own benefits. 

In this detailed blog, we will look into the various methodologies that we should follow to get our web application up and running.

So let’s get started.

The Ideation stage

Having an idea for your application is the first step in developing your web application. You should be aware of the problem your application is trying to solve and whether it will remain viable over the coming years. However, the real question is: what kind of application do you want to create?

Today, a wide variety of web applications are available; let’s examine some of them.

Static web pages: These are the types of web pages that are rarely updated, and all of the files are prebuilt so that when the user requests something, it will respond with media, text, or whatever it is that the user is looking for. These are mostly websites for resumes, brochures, or static business landing pages.

Single-page applications: Instead of using the standard procedure of having a web browser load entirely new pages, a single-page application dynamically rewrites the current web page with fresh information from the web server to interact with the user.

Dynamic web applications: Dynamic websites are designed to deliver and display the content of each page dynamically, or on-the-fly, based on user behavior or content generated by users.

Additionally, there are several decisions that you need to make at this stage, such as whether we need server-side rendering or client-side rendering. Even in the development stage, some decisions have to be made.

Design and Development stage

At this stage, we develop some features, break things down and determine what needs to be changed, which stack to use, etc.

Website development begins with a design, and web designers use tools such as Figma, Canva, or Photoshop to create mockups for the design. And now that we’ve decided on a design, the real fun begins.

In the blog, I mentioned that we have several decisions to make about the tools and frameworks we should use. Now is the time we actually decide those things. We need HTML and CSS at the very basic level, but using just those will be difficult if we have a huge application. We have to select the front-end tools, back-end tools, and databases suitable for our application.

Which frontend tools and technologies should you use?

Currently, JavaScript is the only language that web browsers understand(using web assembly, we can use other languages). And as it happens, there are a lot of JavaScript front-end libraries and frameworks. We will look into some of the popular JavaScript libraries for our aid:

React JS

 React is a widely preferred front-end UI library used in nearly 50 million projects every month. React, which is backed by Facebook, has dominated the web development space for over nine years and has several notable customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. 

Plainness and flexibility are the two primary reasons that contribute to React’s growing popularity. React can be used for both small-scale and large-scale applications, and it will work well in both cases.

Angular JS

AngularJS, which was developed by Adam Abrons and Misko Hevery in 2008-2009, is now maintained by Google. AngularJS is an open-source Javascript framework that primarily facilitates the development of single-page web applications (SPAs). Web application development is made easier with this framework’s continuous growth and expansion.

Vue JS

VueJS is a progressive JavaScript framework for developing interactive web interfaces. The front-end part of the application is more focused on the view. There is no problem integrating it with other projects or libraries. The installation of VueJS is fairly simple, and beginners can easily understand and start building their own user interfaces. The ideal user experience is Vue. js’s main feature, which it achieved by combining React and Angular’s top-level features. Additionally, it improved the code structure and made use of the virtual DOM’s capabilities.

Other frameworks include Svelte, Hydrogen, Preact, Laravel, and others. You can choose any of those that fit well for the application.

When it comes to styling, we have several CSS frameworks that can help us with styling. A few of these are CSS-in-JS libraries, styled-components, independent frameworks, and so on. We will now look into some of those:

Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS is an open-source utility-first CSS framework that makes it easy to apply excellent styling to your React web application by choosing from the framework’s ready-made CSS classes. Tailwind CSS  gives you the creative control to create dynamic components—which means you can tweak the values of properties to make highly customizable UI components.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is an open-source toolkit for developing responsive websites and applications. Bootstrap is a suite carrying a collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript toolkits for creating websites. The Bootstrap Grid system helps you to create your layout and easily build a responsive website.

There are many more CSS frameworks, but these two are popular among developers these days, and you are not limited to just these. You can pick other frameworks like Foundation, Bulma, Material CSS etc.

With a better understanding of the front-end tools to use, we can now check out the languages and libraries for the back-end development of your web application.

Which backend languages and libraries should you use?

The frontend is the visual part of your application, and the backend is the logic part of your application. You should implement your logic in such a way that it won’t result in any kind of security flaws, overloading , authentication and authorisation of users, etc. There are several choices of language and libraries, and we can check those out:

JavaScript

Given that your frontend is likely to use JavaScript and that having both codebases in JavaScript makes switching easier for developers, JavaScript is one of your best options for the backend.

Since JavaScript is only supported on browsers, we need a server environment to run JavaScript code. For this purpose, we use node.js, a JavaScript runtime environment. Node is an open source environment for creating server-side and networking applications. Node.js programs are written in JavaScript and executed by the Node.js runtime on Linux, OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

In order to work with NodeJS, we use the ExpressJS library. Express is a flexible web application framework for Node.js that offers a strong set of features for both web and mobile applications.

Python

Another excellent choice for backend development is Python.With built-in libraries that can be used for almost any programming task, Python comes with a wide range of features by default. Python helps developers by providing them with solutions that they would otherwise have to create manually, saving them time and effort on everything from scientific calculations to image processing, operating system interfaces, and protocols.

One of the most used Python libraries for web applications is Django. Making effective web applications quickly is possible with Django. Because Django includes built-in features for everything, including the Django Admin Interface and the default database, SQLlite3, it is also known as a “batteries included” framework.

Flask is another well-liked Python library. Flask is a web development framework. It is a framework with an integrated debugger and development server.

Thanks to the Flask framework, web developers are able to be flexible and easily accommodate the frequently released changes in the software development community, which sets it apart from other archetypes.

Golang

The best elements of several other programming languages are combined in Go. For example, it performs well like C/C++ and Java and is useful for a variety of tasks like Python. It has excellent scalability, advanced memory safety, concurrency, dynamically formatted interfaces, and dynamic formatting. These characteristics make this language the ideal choice for cloud interfaces, network apps, and microservices.

There are numerous backend languages, including Java, C, C++, and C#. According to stackoverflow, the most popular backend languages are JavaScript, Python, and Go. Now that we are aware of the backend development languages, we can check out the various databases that we can use to store our web application data.

Which Databases should you use for your application?

A database is a structured collection of data that is typically stored electronically in a computer system. In most cases, a database management system is in charge of a database. When it comes to databases, there are only two main options: SQL and NoSQL databases.

SQL

When creating, maintaining, and retrieving data from relational databases, Structured Query Language, also known as SQL, is used. In a relational database, data is stored in one or more tables  of columns and rows, making it simple to see and comprehend how various data structures relate to one another. Data is organized in relational databases according to predefined relationships.

Some of the most popular SQL databases are MySQL and Microsoft SQL. Due to their increased stability and ability to guarantee data integrity, SQL databases are a better fit for demanding or complicated transactions. You must make sure of ACID compliance (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) or define exactly how transactions interact with a database.

NoSQL

NoSQL databases store data differently from relational tables because they are not tabular databases. Depending on the data model, there are different types of NoSQL databases. Document, key-value, wide-column, and graph are the main types. With a lot of data and a lot of users, they scale well and offer flexible schemas.

Some of the most popular NoSQL databases are MongoDB, DynamoDB, Firebase Firestore. NoSQL is ideal to use if we are constantly adding new features, functions, and data types and also when we can trade-off data consistency and integrity.

We now have some ideas for the databases you should use to store the data component of your application. It’s time to test our web application now.

Testing Your Web Application

Prior to going live and becoming publicly accessible, web testing, also known as website testing, involves checking your web application or website for potential bugs. Web testing examines the website or web application’s performance, compatibility, security, and usability.

The following list includes some of the website testing checklists:

Functional testing: Testing the functionality of a website’s user interface, APIs, databases, security, clients, servers, and other fundamental features is referred to as functional testing.

Usability testing: It  is an essential component of any web-based project. It can be conducted by testers like you or a small focus group that represents the web application’s target market.

Interface TestingA type of software testing that examines the effectiveness of communication between two various software systems.

Database Testing: A subset of software testing that examines the structure, tables, triggers, and other components of the database that is being tested. 

There are numerous additional tests like security testing, performance testing etc.,that you can run to make sure your web application is functioning as expected and won’t break in use.

These are the fundamental steps for building a web application from scratch. 

Scaling the web application will be another requirement after the web application becomes successful. Scalability is an application’s ability to maintain consistent performance regardless of how many people use it at the same time. As a result, a big-scale web app is one that can manage massive amounts of data and traffic while also adapting to significant load variations without compromising operational quality. 

You can scale your web application by reducing server demand, employing caching engines like Redis, scaling the server, and other methods.

Wrapping It Up!

Congratulations on reaching this far! You’re a fantastic reader!

In this detailed blog, we looked at how we can make a web application from scratch.. We’ve spoken about various front-end and backend tools, technologies, customizing, and identifying the ideal tool and more. This blog is a good start if you are going to create a web application from scratch.

Now you know how to create a web application from scratch.

Happy Developing!

 

 

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Adarsh M

Adarsh M

A soon-to-be engineer and software developer. Curious about advanced tools and Web technologies. Loves to be a part of fast moving technical world.

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