Programming and the cloud - what future programmers needs to know

We will talk about bare bones software development.

Front-end and Back-end, The Future of Development

Back-end – It’s About Scale and Balance:

It is obvious that the developer of tomorrow who wishes to focus primarily on back-end development is going to have to understand the realities of building applications using a number of different component parts and having those parts all work together no matter how much the demand scales.

Back-end developers need to have a broad understanding of the different parts of the application stack (for example database, API servers and legacy systems) and need to deeply understand how different layers of the application stack interact. They also need to think about how that interaction will change over time and need to consider application demands potentially scaling both massively and erratically. Modern day back-end developers don’t ship code, they deploy it.

Front-end – It’s about Interaction, Device Specifics and Beauty

If the back-end part of development is involved with balance and efficiency, the front-end role is much more humanistic. Front-end developers spend much time thinking about how their users will integrate with the application, and they also have to consider that interaction occurring on a range of devices (web, mobile, touch, different form factors etc.).

This is a role that has become increasingly complex. Whereas in the past a front-end developer may have had to consider an interface on a browser and a mobile device, they now have to consider users’ experiences across multiple mobile operating systems – Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iOS, Android – along with traditional web browsers. If that wasn’t enough, front-end developers now have to consider the application interface on a variety of form factors (smart phones of various sizes, multiple tablet sizes and traditional web). An individual user is today likely to have a range of devices that spans multiple operating systems and form factors – they demand consistency and appropriate user experience across these devices.

For this reason there has been a trend towards the specialisation of front-end developers with people tending to focus primarily on one or two operating systems. As we will see, however, the rise of non-proprietary, standards-based interface tools such as HTML5 is tending to lessen this complexity.

Back-end – The Nuts and Bolts

The back-end system upon which developers build applications can be separated into three distinct areas or tiers – the logic tier, the database tier and the infrastructure tier. The highest back-end tier is the logic tier upon which data is processed. In order for this data to be available, the next tier, the database tier, handles the storage and retrieval of data. The database tier separates data storage from the servers upon which the business logic is processed. Finally, the infrastructure tier is where the servers that run both the data tier and the logic tier are maintained. It is at the infrastructure tier that server management and automation occur. Between all of these tiers there are additional processes such as caching and load balancing. 

REFERENCE

Ben Kepes - Rackspace More information on Ben and Diversity Limited can be found at http://diversity.net.nz