Web development comes with a huge set of rules and techniques every website developer should know about. If you want a website to look and function as you wish them to, you need to get familiar with web technologies that will help you achieve your goal. Developing an app or a website typically comes down to knowing 3 main languages: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. And while it sounds quite complicated, once you know what you are doing, understanding web technology and the way it works becomes significantly easier. Now, let’s take a look.

What is Web Technology?

You have probably heard the term “web development technologies” before, but did you ever think about what it actually means? Since computers can’t communicate with each other the way people do, they require codes instead. Web technologies are the markup languages and multimedia packages computers use to communicate.

1. Browsers

Browsers request information and then they show us in the way we can understand. Think of them as the interpreters of the web. Here are the most popular ones: Google Chrome – Currently, the most popular browser brought to you by Google Safari – Apple’s web browser Firefox – Open-source browser supported by the Mozilla Foundation Internet Explorer – Microsoft’s browser

2. HTML & CSS

HTML is one of the first you should learn. Thanks to HTML, the web browsers know what to show once they receive the request. If you want to better understand how HTML works, you also need to know what CSS is. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on the screen. If you browse enough tutorials, you’ll soon create CSS text effects, page transitions, image hover effects, and more.  If you’re a complete beginner, this Essential HTML & CSS training by James Williamson will help you to quickly get started with these technologies.

3. Web Development Frameworks

Web development frameworks are a starting point of items that a developer can use to avoid doing the simple or mundane task, and instead get right to work.

1. Angular

2. Ruby on Rails

3. YII

4. Meteor JS

5. Express.js

6. Zend

7. Django

8. Laravel

4. Programming Languages

As we explained before, since computers don’t use languages that are anything like human languages, they need a different way to communicate. Here are some of the most popular programming languages: Javascript – used by all web browsers, Meteor, and lots of other frameworks CoffeeScript – a “dialect” of JavaScript. It is viewed as simpler but it converts back into JavaScript Python – used by the Django framework as well as in the majority of mathematical calculations Ruby – used by the Ruby on Rails framework PHP – used by WordPress to create those WYSIWYG editors that everyone is using now. It’s also used by Facebook, Wikipedia, and other major sites Go – newer language, built for speed Swift – Apple’s newest programming language Java – used by Android and a lot of desktop applications. So let’s talk about the most popular ones in a bit more detail.

1. JavaScript

2. Ruby

3. Elixir

4. Scala

5. Protocols

 The instructions for how to pass information back and forth between computers and devices are commonly known as protocols. 

HTTP

 Thanks to this protocol, each website can get to the browser. The protocol requests the website from Google’s server and then receives a response with the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of the website. 

DDP

 Uses WebSockets to create a consistent connection between the client and the server. As a result of that, you get website updates in real-time without having to refresh the browser. 

REST

 Used mostly for API’s, this protocol has standard methods like GET, POST, and PUT that let information be exchanged between applications. 

6. API

An API (application programming interface) allows other developers to use some of the app’s functionality without sharing the code.  The endpoints are exposed by the developers while the API can control access with an API key. Examples of well-made APIs are those created by Facebook, Twitter, and Google for their web services. 

7. Data formats

Data is stored in a structure called a data format.  JSON – JavaScript Object Notation is a syntax for storing and exchanging data (just like XML). It is currently becoming the most popular data format out there.  XML – Predominantly used by Microsoft systems, it used to be the most popular data format  CSV – is data formatted by commas; for example Excel data 

8. Client (or Client-side)

Each user of an application is called a client. Clients can be computers, mobile devices, tablets etc. Usually, multiple clients are interacting with the same app stored on a server. 

9. Server (or Server-side)

The application code is usually stored on the server. The clients make requests to the servers. The servers then respond to those requests after gathering the requested information. 

Ending thoughts on the latest web technologies

In order to stay up to date with the latest web technologies, one has to learn new things all the time. Web technologies are being improved and updated all the time and every web development team should take advantage of that whenever possible.  New web technologies change the entire web development process and it can be hard sometimes to understand all of them in the right way. Luckily, with the right internet technology tutorial, you should be able to learn more about them in no time. If you enjoyed reading this article on web technologies, you should check out this one about web application development.  We also wrote about a few related subjects like web development trends and web application testing.