What is Backend?

Let's talk about websites. Whenever you visit a website, there are two main "types" of applications that you'll interact with: the frontend and the backend.

The frontend is the stuff that you see. It's the .html files, including any JavaScript that we put inside it. The backend, however, is everything that you don't see. When you log in to a website, your browser talks to the backend of the website and handles authentication. When you view a webpage with dynamic (changing content, think of a social media site), that uses the backend. The purpose of a backend is to provide data of some kind to the frontend, be it information about your account, a recommended post, or the README file on a programming website, it all is handled by the backend.

I've made a little example for you to give you an idea of how a backend server might look (and how the frontend would interact with it). Throughout this unit, we'll be working with both the backend and frontend, but we'll be prioritizing function over form (as you can see, the frontend doesn’t look very good). In practice, you wouldn't make a frontend like this, but you would make a backend like this (and that's what we're focusing on).

Take a look at both the frontend and backend files and see if you can change them around to do something else. We'll go over exactly how everything works later on. Good luck!