What is web development?

When a visitor, like you, enters an address like amazon.com in the browser, how does the web actually work? What’s happening there? And to understand this, I want to take a step back and look at a real-world analogy because browsing the web and visiting a website is actually like calling a friend, or sending a text message to a friend. This is an analogy we can make. In the effort to understand this, let’s take a closer look at this analogy. When you call a friend, you pick up the phone, dial their number, or send a text message to them. Once the connection is established once they pick up the call you tell them something, or ask something, you greet them, etc. You start a conversation. After you greet them and maybe say or ask something, your friend will probably reply. He or she will respond or send back another text message. That’s how a phone conversation works back and forth. Now, visiting a website is pretty much the same. You’re sitting at your computer using your browser , the key tool we need to access websites. In that browser, you enter an address like amazon.com (or click a search result), and either way, you end up with an address in the browser’s address bar. This address has an official name: URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Then what happens next is that your browser sends a request to a remote computer on the internet operated by the company that owns the website (Amazon, in this case). The browser sends a request, and this process is standardized so both browser and remote computer speak the same language. The standard controlling this request and its structure is called HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), or HTTPS if the communication is encrypted. This is why some URLs begin with http:// or https:// — typically added automatically by the browser. On this remote machine (the server), we have the website code written by web developers (e.g., Amazon developers). This website code contains browser instructions for what to display and how it should be styled. That code is sent back to the browser as a response. The browser reads and handles the standardized instructions, bringing the website onto the screen. This process, the request-response cycle, typically takes milliseconds — fast and efficient. In this context, the browser and user (you) are called the client or front-end. The remote computer hosting and sending the website is called the server or back-end.