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Ruby

Dillon Carter
Dillon Carter
6,364 Points

Would I Need A Back End

I'm wanting to create a site like http://canopy.co and I'm not sure if I would need to build a backend or not?

I could add the products manually in the code but that would not be ideal. I'm sort of lost here. Would a teacher mind weighing in on this?

5 Answers

Kang-Kyu Lee
Kang-Kyu Lee
52,045 Points

Even when you are going to work with a back-end Rails developer (and front-end be your part) why don't you take these recent courses of Rails

  • Rails Layouts and CSS Frameworks
  • The Rails Asset Pipeline and Styling
  • Rails Partials and Helpers
  • Ruby on Rails Forms
  • Blank Slates in Ruby on Rails

This would really help!!!

Dillon Carter
Dillon Carter
6,364 Points

That would be my goal. I have been taking the Ruby track for a bit and delving more into the language. Just wasn't sure what all I would need to build this.

Maciej Czuchnowski
Maciej Czuchnowski
36,441 Points

I believe that whenever you're dealing with users that log in and register, some products that you want to create, edit or delete and make some associations between products and users, you'd definitely need a backend and store everything in a database to do all this quickly and efficiently. Doing all this manually would be a real torture, even if you resign from having users (can't imagine registrations and log ins without backend).

Robert Ho
Robert Ho
Courses Plus Student 11,383 Points

Maciej is right. Since you will need to store data, you will need a back end. Only the back-end/server-side languages can take requests and "translate" those requests to talk to the databases. And even as Maciej suggested, you would need the back end to do things dynamically, meaning for example, you don't want to recreate the same web page by hand for each item. The backend code can take data, do some logic, and spit out a page catered to your item's corresponding data. If you didn't have this, you would have to do this manually for each page and hard coding all the data in, which would be A LOT of work. Another example would be like for Amazon.com where all their items have the same pages except the product image, description and misc information is different but overall each page looks the same. There just wouldn't be enough time for all their developers to recreate the same page with different data each time, even if they copied and pasted the code over and over lol. Theoretically, I guess you can do this with Javascript if you are looking to hard code everything page by page, but its way more trouble than its worth, and you would have to be pretty advanced in Javascript to do it.

I'm no teacher, but I know that you would need back end for that kind of website. Only because you need to sign up and order products. Anything that takes input from a user needs backend dev, with a few exceptions.

I would recommend ruby on rails for this site. It will be pain free!!!!

Dillon Carter
Dillon Carter
6,364 Points

Thanks for the help guys :) Luckily I am already on the Ruby on Rails track so I just need to keep learning and do what I can as I learn it.

I think this would be a challenging project to develop my skills even further and learn a ton. Now I just need to get focused on getting back to my routine of taking the courses.

You guys rock!