The Tools
As we decided to embark on this journey of a week over three months, we were in a fix about the platforms, tools and resources we would need to use. We were uninitiated to the entire process of web development and were a bit overwhelmed by exploring the various frameworks and tools available for us to incorporate and use. We knew that we could only spare roughly a month’s time to comprehend and master the same owing to our busy schedules and continuous assessments. This led us to our final decision to make use of the most easily available resources.
The web application is often comprehended as an integration of two different parts —
1. The Front-end is considered to be the part of the application that the user can see or interact through. This involves all the screens, designs, widgets and the information that is displayed to the user through the application.
2. The Back-end is considered to be the part which remains abstracted from the user’s view and often involves the processes & services that help the applications process user requests & interact with the databases.
The Front-end
As per the limitations mentioned above, we thought of using Bootstrap 4.0 which would help us create a responsive, aesthetic and a powerful User Interface for our website. The idea was to achieve design consistency and target an enriching experience for a user, regardless of the device or platform used. We were excited to use the predefined JavaScript classes and JQuery plugins that would make the process of front-end development easier than what we imagined prior.
Apart from this plethora of styles and components, we wished to create custom classes or components as the need arose.
The Back-end
To keep the process of development simple, we wanted to work with the least number of languages possible. So, we decided to go for NodeJS, “an open source, cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment” that is used widely by the web development community. This framework has a variety of modules that help us set up our server with ease, process various types of requests and a lot more. These modules or packages are managed by the NPM, an abbreviation for “Node Package Manager”.
Now, the last thing we needed to check off our lists was deciding on the database to be used. We decided unanimously to make use of MongoDB, arguably one of the most popular NoSQL databases today, and a quintessential for the NodeJS.
This is how we zeroed down on the process of selecting the most suitable frameworks for our web application. Stay tuned for more Dev Blogs.
