What Some Common Languages Do and How They Work Together

3:21 with Joy Kesten

The title says it all! In this video you're going to learn about what some languages do and how they work together. We'll start with a real world example to explain the client-server model, and then get into the languages used for front end (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and back end (PHP, Ruby, and Python) development.

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To begin our journey about what common languages do and how they work together,
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let's begin by dissecting the languages needed for a web application.
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On second thought, let's begin at the drive-through.
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Imagine you're at a drive-through.
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You order some food through one of those giant intercom menus.
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That order's sent to the kitchen where they make the food.
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When the food is ready, it's put into a bag and handed to you through the window.
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When you originally placed your order at the intercom,
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it was like typing a URL into the browser.
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The URL is sent to a web server,
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the kitchen, which then produces what you asked for.
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When the content is retrieved, aka your food is ready, it's placed in a bag and
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handed through the window, or the front end of the website.
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Just like a drive-through wouldn't put just any order through the window when you
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drive up, it's the same for a website.
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This is called the client server model.
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The client makes a request to the server.
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And the server gives back the content to the client.
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Once the page has loaded,
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from this point on when you send messages through the front-end,
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you are sending messages to the back-end, which then returns what you asked for.
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For example, maybe you forgot to ask for ketchup, so
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you ask the nice lady at the front for some ketchup.
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She turns around and asks the kitchen for
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a packet of ketchup and hands it to you, and you walk away happy.
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You can see this when you go to the Treehouse website.
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When I pull up my Treehouse home page, I only see my information.
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Like the points I've accrued,
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my name, and the course I'm on have all come from the server.
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But the layout and styling are going to look the same, whether it's you or
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anyone else signing on to the Treehouse site.
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The front end, or the drive-through window if you will,
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uses images in the languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
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HTML and CSS are not programming languages exactly.
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HTML is a markup language which builds the structure of the website.
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And CSS is a styling language which tells the browser how
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to make that structure look.
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Let's leave those languages aside for now.
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You'll learn a lot more about them later.
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The back-end, or
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the kitchen in our analogy, is made of what are called server-side languages.
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And there are many different languages like PHP, Ruby, Java, and
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Python to choose from.
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Whether you're programming for a website or mobile app,
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you're going to be dealing with a lot of the same process you just saw for the Web.
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One of the big differences when developing mobile versus the Web is
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the number of languages you'll need to use.
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If you're programming for a mobile android device like the Moto 360 or
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Samsung Galaxy,
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you'll probably just be using Java to program the whole application.
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If you wanted to build something for a mobile iOS device, like an iPhone or
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an iPad, you'll be using Swift or Objective-C.
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Hopefully now you have a better grasp of what back-end and
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front-end languages are and how they work together.
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In the next video we'll talk about the similarities and differences between some
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of the back-end languages we discussed like Ruby, Python, PHP, and Java.

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What Some Common Languages Do and How They Work Together

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