[Amit]

There are a lot of opinions about this and I’m trying to get the most definite one. What do the terms back-end and front-end exactly mean in the web development world? Until now, whenever I’ve used the term front-end I’ve always talked about the client-side or to be exact, I’ve talked about HTML, CSS and Javascript. Whenever someone referred to back-end I’ve referred to the server-side programming language used to power up that website (PHP, Ruby, Python etc.).

Lately, I’ve stumbled across a lot of articles that referred to front-end and back-end (in web development) as totally something else. Let me quote a paragraph regarding Facebook:

Facebook uses a variety of services, tools, and programming languages to make up its core infrastructure. At the front end, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Facebook’s backend services are written in a variety of different programming languages including C++, Java, Python, and Erlang.

Twitter is a fast growing website that provides a micro-blogging service. It began its life as a Ruby on Rails application, and still uses Ruby on Rails to deliver most user-facing web pages. But about a year ago they started replacing some of the back-end Ruby services with applications running on the JVM and written in Scala

Also the Stack Exchange websites are written in ASP for the front-end and C# for the back-end (not sure about this one).

I would really like to combine different programming languages to create different parts of a website. Seeing that I’m very familiar with PHP, quite good in Java and C#, I’d really like to make use of my knowledge and combine 2 or all of these programming languages I know.

The question is how? Is there any good book or tutorial that would teach me how to create different aspects of a website in different programming languages and then combine them?

[Abhey]

before starting out to do that , get clear on the terms front end and back end …

frontend : what the user can see in front and the software that makes the website looking like it is
backend : the stuff in the background making this happening

you will need to bridge the frontend and backend, bringing them together , example :

front end : PHP with shell module and LAMP
backend : FTP Server

if the user clicks a link , the front end will send a command to the backend, instructing it to do something, for example, create a ftp account , this info is relayed back to the front end API and displayed while a shell script sets up the user , group and password, home directory etc.

If you plan a website that does not only display standard html / php stuff with a database in the backend , think of the language needed to do what you want it to do and write it ….

as to how : not really sure, id say google for backend web programming or something. But you will need to know first what you want to create , then search for an API that makes the bridge to the backend services

[LillyIsaacson]

You are correct, but you’re being very specific. In general, erik’s definition is very accurate: front end is what the user see’s, back end is what makes it all work.

The language(s) to use depend on the project, hosting specifications and desired audience. If you’re familiar with php, it makes sense that your back end would be done in php to generate the dynamic content, and then HTML/javascript used on the front end to show what the php had generated.

If you’re into C#, you could consider doing the back end in C#.net using Visual Studio, but you’ll need a server that has Windows in order to reliably host it (due to needing IIS/.net).

There’s really no reason to try to focus on how you can put as many languages as possible into the site. This is one of those things where typically less is more. Use what you need to accomplish the project and make those work as well as possible.