An Overview of Software Development

Software development is a complex process full of many steps and many components. These components ensure that conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, and testing an application, a framework, or software is respected and well applied.

Components of software

Generally, software is made of the following two components:

• Backend: This represents what the user can’t see; it’s composed of the business logic and data manipulation from a database.

• Frontend: This represents the interface provided to the user to interact with the whole application.

The term frontend refers to the elements of a site or application that users see onscreen and with which they will interact. For example, all internet users will see a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on a website. It is these frontend programming languages that will be interpreted by the browser.

Typically, the frontend consists of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery (or other UI libraries or frameworks) used to replicate a design. The design is created by the web designer who will create graphic models with dedicated tools, such as Photoshop or Figma.

Client-server architecture

Here, we’ll focus on web development. Web development is the part of software development focused on building websites and web applications, and the notion of web development relies on a client-server architecture.

The client-server architecture represents an environment in which applications running on a client machine can communicate with other applications installed on a server machine, which provides services or data from a database.

On the web, the client will simply be a browser used to request a page or a resource from a server.

Here’s a simple diagram demonstrating this: