How web applications work

Brendan Fortuner
1 min readSep 7, 2017

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I made this diagram a year ago, but never found time to write the series of articles behind it. It covers concepts we all “sort of know” but might not be able to explain in an interview. There would be one article for each topic:

  1. Client (What happens when you click Order Now?)
  2. Networking (How does information travel across internet?)
  3. Security (How do we prevent hackers from stealing our passwords?)
  4. Server (What does “the cloud” mean exactly?)
  5. Application (What are web servers and web frameworks?)
  6. Database (How do applications retrieve data? SQL vs NoSQL?)
  7. Scaling (How do applications handle millions of requests?)
  8. Rendering (How do browsers work? Basics of JavaScript.)

Anyway.. I hope someday I can use this cool diagram :)

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