Understanding Web Development

Most of my career has been on the backend so I’ve categorized my work as mostly working with input that I’ve been provided and then output some form of manipulated data for other functions or services to use. But I don’t think I ever fully understood what was involved with web development from a full stack perspective. I know how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work in theory but there has always been this void of understanding how all 3 parts work together with the backend server to create a website.

I’m currently spending some time going through a Udemy course just to get caught up to speed with\ the current state of how the web works as a whole. The course itself use ExpressJS as the backend framework and boy has it been eye-opening for me. I’ve used Flask and FastAPI in the past never really put two and two together how the web essentially makes these RESTful API calls to the server to get what it needs and then renders that response in some pre-defined template.

I went on a slight tangent to see what other backend frameworks are currently out there, especially written in the Rust programming language. LogRocket had published a blog article on The Current State of Rust Web Frameworks earlier this year so I took a quick read to know what’s being worked on and if there was even interest in making a framework written in Rust or if it would be considered overkill in general. To put it short, it is definitely in it’s infancy and most shouldn’t be used for production use yet. The page did forget to mention warp (as pointed out in the comment section of the page) so I’ll leave a link to the repository here as well.