Unlike the front-end, which must be built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, there’s a lot of flexibility in which technologies can be used in order to create the back-end of a web application. Developers can construct back-ends in many different languages like PHP, Java, JavaScript, Python, and more.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to create a robust back-end. Instead, most developers make use of frameworks which are collections of tools that shape the organization of your back-end and provide efficient ways of accomplishing otherwise difficult tasks.
There are numerous back-end frameworks from which developers can choose. Here are a few examples:
| Framework | Language |
|---|---|
| Laravel | PHP |
| Express.js | JavaScript (runs in the Node environment) |
| Ruby on Rails | Ruby |
| Spring | Java |
| JSF | Java |
| Flask | Python |
| Django | Python |
| ASP.NET | C# |
The collection of technologies used to create the front-end and back-end of a web application is referred to as a stack. This is where the term full-stack developer comes from; rather than working in either the front-end or the back-end exclusively, a full-stack developer works in both.
For example, the MEAN stack is a technology stack for building web applications that uses MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js: MongoDB is used as the database, Node.js with Express.js for the rest of the back-end, and Angular is used as a front-end framework. While the LAMP Stack, sometimes considered the archetypal stack, uses Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.