For building your website or web app, when you hire web
developers, you have two broad options. Either you can opt for specialist
development teams for the frontend and backend or you can just hire a team of
full stack developers who can take care of building both frontend and backend.
There are pros and cons on both sides that we will explore in this post. But
first of all, we will begin by introducing both development skills and
corresponding technologies. Let’s start.
What is Frontend
Development?
Frontend development is all about building the client-side
user interface or everything that the web users directly interact with.
Frontend developers by using some frameworks and tools shape the interactive
features, functionalities, and the look and feel of the website that directly
concerns user interactions. Frontend development to a great extent determines
the user experience and interactive attributes of a website.
Popular frontend technologies in the market include Angular,
React, Vue, Flutter and several others. Specialist frontend developers
by using any of these frontend development frameworks build the user interface
of the website. Since they are specialists, they have the expertise and skills
to shape the frontend of the website as per desired requirements or
expectations. On the other hand, for the server-side or backend of the project
and the database they need to rely on the backend development team.
What is Backend
Development?
Backend development is all about shaping the server-side
configurations and database of the website that make server responses to user
interactions possible. Without aligning a properly configured backend and
database the user interactions with the frontend will not give any result from
the server. Naturally, backend development has a higher stake in the
performance and loading time of the website.
Popular backend technologies in the market include NodeJS,
ExpressJS, PHP, Django, Python, Ruby on Rails and many others. Specialist
backend developers by leveraging any of these technologies and database systems
such as MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL and others configure the servers for prompt
response time and seamless performance. They are also responsible for
integrating third-party APIs for enriching the website with custom features.
They also need to depend on their frontend counterparts to shape the entire web
project.
What is Full-Stack
Development?
Full-stack development brings a shift to the approach of
hiring specialist frontend and backend developers for a web development
project. Full stack development is about building the entire website by
developer resources skilled in building both frontend and backend. When you hire full-stack
developers instead of separate specialist teams of frontend and backend
experts, you can save the cost on resources and allow a small neat team to finish
the entire project with a consistent and mutually shared vision.
Full-stack development technologies are the well-known
stacks comprising frontend, backend, database and middleware frameworks and
tools. Some of the popular stacks in this category include MEAN (MongoDB for
database, ExpressJS for middleware, Angular for frontend and NodeJS for
backend), MERN (MongoDB for database, ExpressJS for middleware, ReactJS for
frontend and NodeJS for backend), LAMP (Linux for operating system, Apache web
server, MySQL database and PHP as server-side scripting language) and several
others.
Full-stack developers are often referred to as master of multiple skills as
they can build a website from scratch by taking care of all the required
components belonging to frontend, backend, middleware and database systems. The
biggest advantage of hiring full-stack developers is the competitive cost
advantage as you need to hire just a small team of full-stack developers for
the entire project. There are also some demerits such as lack of in-depth
expertise with frontend and backend that specialist developers are known for.
Read More: https://www.encodedots.com/blog/choosing-specialist-developers-vs-full-stack-developers