How the Web Works

Anatomy of a Web Application

Web applications are composed of 3 major components

• Databases
• Store data.
• On a social media site, this might be your username, password, friends, birthday, posts, etc.
• Clients
• The computers rendering the web app.
• Like your computer. My computer, etc.
• Servers
• Manage the flow of communication between the client and the database.
• Servers are how the data from the database gets to page you are viewing.

Languages of a Web Application

What language belongs to which component?

The next modules and lessons will be focusing on the client-side or Front-end languages:

• HTML
• Hypertext Markup Language determines what appears on a website. It’s the content, the words, the images.
• CSS
• Cascading Style Sheets determines how content appears on the page. It’s the color, the positioning, the size, and the overall styling.
• JavaScript
• The programming language of front-end development.
• This is the language we use to manipulate the data coming from an API (Application Programming Interface) and get it onto the page.

Getting Data to Users

• A web application is fundamentally about displaying data to users in a meaningful and easy to digest manner.
• The first section of the pre-work involved Java which is used to create web APIs
• Once an API is built you can use the Front-End to retrieve that data and display it in a browser.
• We’ll spend a lot of time in the next module on the basics of how to get that data from the API to the page. For now we just want you to know that it’s possible!

This module is about simply understanding that we can get data on to the page and focusing on learning the ends and outs of how to present and style that data.