Jargon Busting / Web Dev Terms Explained
There always has been a lot of terms around the web development community. This can be confusing for new and aspiring developers. Let me explain some of these industry-specific terms today to help out any new developers on board.
Yoda teaching younglings - via GIPHY
Index (kinda?)
Agile Development
API - Application programmable interface
CORS - Cross Origin Resource Sharing
DOM - Document Object Model
Foo Bar
Front End Back End
Micro Services and Monolithic
PWA - Progressive Web Apps
Rubber Duck
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Serverless Computing and the Cloud
Version Control and Git
Agile development
General Development term.
Check out this Atlassian guide.
Agile development is a concept to project management where a team refines a product through many iterations throughout its lifespan. In this approach, the team will be kept small and constantly listen to user feedback to improve their product during development.
Application Programmable Interface
General development term.
Check out this Medium post about web APIs.
As the name implies, an Application Programmable Interface is an interface that allows 2 pieces of software to talk to each other. It can be used to describe something as simple as a built-in function in Java. Or, it is referring to something that provides you with your user data, like the Facebook Graph API.
CORS - Cross Origin Resource Sharing
Web development term.
Check out this documentation from Mozilla and this post from Auth0.
Cross Origin Resource Sharing is a security protocol that allows the scripts from your domain to interact with resources (such as images, JSON data) from other domains.
DOM - Document Object Model
Front end web development term.
Check out this introduction from Mozilla and this post from freecodecamp.org.
The Document Object Model is a programming interface that describes and represents your web page. This Google developer's guide explains how your HTML code is rendered into the page that your user sees through the DOM. When the DOM is optimized properly, your web page could render super fast and be super responsive.
Foo Bar
Just a common term.
Check out this detailed answer from stack overflow.
Just a place holder for variable names.
Front End / Back End
Web development term.
Check out this cool frontend developer roadmap on GitHub and this backend.
For every solution will require a client and server abstraction. Like this blog right now, your browser will be the front end client and my Ghost blog will be the back end server.
The back end code should not be accessible to the user client.
Micro-services and Monolithic
Web development term.
Check out Monolithic and Microservices on KoderLabs Medium.
Micro-services and Monolithic are software design models.
Micro-services, as the name implies, is a software design where each component/feature is independent and self-contained. Each service communicates with each other via standard APIs such as RESTful or GraphQL. Examples of such an implementation will be Social Media Logins and Firebase Realtime DB.
Monolithic is a software design that is the exact opposite of micro-services. The entire software stack is developed on a single stack, from the front-end web page to the database. The entire system is built with a single and complete framework. Examples of such a system will be Java Server Pages.
PWA - Progressive Web Apps
Front end web development term.
Check out this medium post and this Google developer guide.
A progressive web app is a web page that behaves like a native mobile application. Since the introduction of JavaScript Web Workers, we are able to run background tasks without granting them any access to the Document Object Model. It allows the developers to easily do things like data caching, exchanging session data, preload images and text. Browser APIs (caution, the site does not have HTTPS) allows the developer to interface with the device and enables the web application to behave like a native app.
Rubber Duck
Just a common term.
A literal and physical rubber duck that a developer puts on his desk so he can "explain" to the duck while writing code. Personally, I have seen a senior developer use a Goku figurine in place of a rubber duck.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Web development term.
Check out this GoDaddy page.
Search Engine Optimization is the art of making your web page more visible on search engines.
Serverless Computing and the Cloud
Web development and DevOps term.
Check out this resource by Cloudfare, this resource by AWS, this resource from Microsoft Azure and this post by Auth0.
Most modern-day solution (be it IoT or a blog or a video streaming service) will require a back end (as mentioned above). Traditionally, that means the solution provider has to buy physical hardware to host their back end (computers, networking gear, etc). With the introduction of Cloud Computing from providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, developers and sysadmins can deploy solutions in those data centres. They just have to rent computing power from these cloud providers and without the cost, risk, forecasting/planning/scaling concerns and technical knowledge required to host their own back end server infrastructure.
Version Control and Git
A useful and essential tool for development.
Check out my post about Version Control and this Atlassian resource.
Git is a program that helps you to manage your source code. At its minimum, Git provides you with "save points", allowing you to backtrack and compare different "save points" and identify exactly when your code went wrong and why you changed it.
-From one of my previous post
Anything else?
If there are existing terms that require correction or additional terms you want me to explain, please tweet me @limxz97 or email me at limxz97@gmail.com.
All of the reference materials I used are available in the links embedded in this post. I thank all of the original writers for their research and effort.
Thanks for reading to the end. Stay tuned next week for a post about a demo project with Vue.js.
Photo by Stephen Paris from Pexels