Front-End And Back-End Development Differences Explained!

By June 5, 2015 Blog No Comments
Front-End And Back-End Development Differences Explained!

If you’ve worked in HTML, JavaScript, or maybe even PHP, chances are you’ve already heard the terms front-end and back-end development being thrown around. Have you actually thought about what it means and which approach fits you best? While some explanations found online can sound confusing, we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty details and help you get a better grasp of the differences.

What Does A Front-End Developer Do?

Front-end development is everything the end-user, or a website visitor sees and interacts with, including HTML and CSS, as well as JavaScript. In layman terms, front-end developers are responsible for the interior design of a house that’s been built with back-end development. They will design the overall look and feel of the website, often in Photoshop without touching a single line of code, or they could take that design and develop a static website using HTML, CSS, and sometimes JavaScript. Front-end developers are also often experienced in frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, AngularJS, Backbone, and EmberJS, in order to provide an enjoyable and memorable browsing experience.

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What Is Back-End Development?

Front-end development is just the tip of the iceberg visible above the surface. However, it’s the back-end development where all the magic happens. Basically, front-end development is everything that visitors can see on a website, and back-end development is how the website works, changes, and updates. The back end of most websites consists of a server, an application, and a database. Back-end development is building and maintaining the technology that powers the front-end side of the website that users see and interact with.

All dynamic websites like blogs, Facebook, and even Google Maps rely heavily on back-end development since their content is constantly changing and updating. The web server delivers a request to the application for specific information, the application looks up the information in the database and puts together a page with the appropriate information.


Back-end developers are mostly in charge of things like security, structure and content management. They generally know and can use languages like HTML and CSS, but that’s definitely not their focus. Instead, back-end developers use languages like Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and .Net to build an application, and tools like MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Oracle to access, save, or edit data and serve it back to the visitor.

Full Stack Developers Are Jacks Of All Trades

Hopefully, by now you’re able to tell the difference between the front-end and back-end development, and decide which one appeals to you the most. As we mentioned before, most back-end developers have at least some experience in front-end development, but in order to be a full stack developer, you will have to know how to set up Linux servers, create server-side APIs, master the client-side JavaScript powering an application, have a good eye for design and be skilled in CSS.

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