How to Code a Simple Web Application from Scratch
The popularity of web development courses has been on the rise lately. You can spend a year studying the basics and switch to the IT field easily. Automation and storing data on a server instead of an Excel file or, leave alone, in a daily planner are helpful tools to jumpstart a business and manage it. Or you can develop a really great tool to manage your customers or create your own blog.
However, what if you need a quick way out? What if you don’t have time to study for several years or even for a year? What if you don’t even need so much knowledge and your main goal is to optimize the way you handle your business? You might be already busy with your studies that are not nearly related to coding.
Sure, you can look for a dissertation writing service and delegate some assignments to professionals to handle extracurriculars. Yet, you will still have to attend lectures, prepare for workshops, and complete team projects, so there is not much time even with some external help. We have good news though! You can code a simple web app without additional education, and here is what you need to know to do it!
Get Acquainted With Basic Technologies
HTML
In order to develop anything that will be used on the internet these days, you need to know what HTML is. The technology is basically about what elements to use to build a page according to standards. In addition, you need to know it in order to apply styles to your page in accordance with the best practices.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets help one design the page to make it user-friendly and nice-looking. It is one of the core tools that serves as a basis for numerous technologies that simplify the creation of animations and styles. In combination with HTML tags, CSS knowledge is enough to create most of the functionality of an ordinary landing page. Sometimes, it can even substitute some JavaScript code.
JavaScript
In order to make your page more or less interactive, manage forms, and work with the server side, JavaScript is an essential tool. It might have some illogical principles and bugs that will never be fixed and that many developers are mad about, but they are not actually that significant, especially if you consider the learning curve.
JS is the core of web development today, but Vanilla JavaScript is rather bulky to still use it these days to write a web app afresh. However, for Google bots to be able to scan your web page, it needs to be written either using Vanilla JS or Next.js (JS framework). These are the most popular methods nowadays.
So, you can either get acquainted with the framework (which will take more time) or practice core JavaScript. The latter is highly recommended if you’d like to try yourself in web development. Yet, in case you don’t need to know a lot of specifics, just go with Next.js
Python or Node.js
If you want to store data on a server, first, you need to build one. While you can opt for another JS framework – Node.js (very similar to Vanilla JS) – or go with PHP-the-undying, Python is a much simpler version. However, if you’d like to stay within the JS ecosystem, Node.js is an obvious choice. In addition, its usage has been on the rise recently, so, if you want to build your career as a web developer, it will be an extremely useful skill.
Others
Obviously, you will need to know how to deploy your app on a website, store your code to avoid major mistakes, and retrieve data from other sites that have an API accessible for free. To be able to do those things, get acquainted with:
- GitHub (to store your code on the cloud)
- REST API (to get data from other servers that don’t belong to you)
- Git (or GitHub desktop) to manage your code locally
- hosting providers
- basics of internet protocols
Practice on Templates
Nothing helps you understand how to code better than taking the working code and ruining it. As you change or delete the lines here and there, the functioning interface shows you what that piece was meant for. To do that, you can download a free template or just work with online editors in a browser on websites like:
- CodePen
- CodeSandbox
- Free Frontend
Use ChatGPT (Carefully)
ChatGPT has become a real life-saver, however, you should remember that it’s a machine. You should always review what it advises you to do with the code. The tool is perfect for strong juniors and middle developers, but if a newbie uses it, it should be mostly done to find recent solutions you can easily google.
In contrast to googling, when using ChatGPT, you don’t have to go through numerous solutions, some of which can be outdated. Yet, ChatGPT is not perfect, either. Since its knowledge is limited to the events up to 2021, it can suggest irrelevant things with great confidence.
You Don’t Actually Have to Do Everything From Scratch
Libraries and templates available these days have been created so that one doesn’t have to write a totally original code and, thus, make a number of mistakes. For example, there is a Bootstrap class system that should be used in most cases to style a web app instead of writing a brand-new CSS sheet. All such things belong to the open-source code, so you don’t have to pay for them. Just learn how to use NPM packages and you will cut the time of development in half if not more!
Takeaway
Sure, during the development of your first app, you are bound to make some mistakes and struggle at some point without prior knowledge and experience. Yet, you don’t need to spend another year or two studying hard to create a simple solution to automate some of your business processes or develop a widget for your browser.