For the past few years, I’ve been focused on learning full-stack web development. It turns out that writing a web application is hard. Here’s the result:
My First, Running Blank Web Application
If you think this web app is just a box that adds to a list, you’re right. It’s ridiculously simple in it’s functionality, but it’s also a fascinating collection of web technologies.
This application serves a page from a hosting service (Heroku) takes data from a user (via web browser), writes it to a database on a separate services (hosted with mLab), reads from the database the updated list of forests and finally serves a page with the updated data to the user.
This is a big day for my career as a builder of web application. A full-stack developer is a person who can make programs on every level from the JavaScript that runs the server to the css which styles the page.
There is a lot I will never understand. Node and V8 go from C++ to JavaScript which I don’t understand. The C++ that runs the database is all written by the MongoDB community. The NPM list of packages is a giant hairball that I don’t understand. Just ‘”npm install” and pray’.
But aside from being in the dark on all of that stuff, I now have a little experience building a full-stack web application.
I’ve open sourced my work so it’s free for anyone to copy this code and use it to write their own web application. You can clone the repository via this link:
Express Skeleton Mongoose Handlebar – Blank App
What is Next?
Now it’s time to write more complex applications.