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Why Should I Even Bother With Full-Stack Development?
Writing code has long been the biggest challenge of software development. How do you combine if-then-else-structures with loops to solve a business problem?
The user interface design was done on the side. The developer was the decisive factor. What she was able to build was what the software looked like. Some developers had talent concerning user interfaces. Some did not.
This changed with the rise of the internet. Graphical user interfaces moved into focus. Even more importantly, those user interfaces did not need to be programmed. The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) enabled designers to build websites. These designers were technically skilled. Of course. But they did not need to be programmers.
At the time, JavaScript was not mandatory. Not very long ago, the company I am working for distinguished “front-end” developers. In those who do the graphical design with HTML and CSS (only). And in those who are capable of working with JavaScript.
JavaScript development was a hacky concept. Front-end developers manipulated the Document Object Model (DOM). That is the page’s hierarchical structure of the HTML-elements. They added, removed, and changed the classes and the other attributes of an HTML-element. Seen from the eyes of a software engineer, this was all hacky! It did not have anything to do with the craft of software engineering.
Would you let a JavaScript developer implement business logic? Would you let her do something you consider critical for the success of your business?
For heaven’s sake, no!
Implementing business logic was left to the back-end developers. These developers took the styled HTML and inserted it into the business logic that they wrote. PHP became popular for making it quite easy to render HTML on the server-side.
But something happened!
Maybe caused by the introduction of HTML5 and “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML” (AJAX). Maybe caused by the advent of Ecma Script. Websites started to act and behave more like applications. An increasing proportion of the business logic was closely coupled to the user interface. With the greater responsibility, frameworks evolved in JavaScript…
