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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:


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.

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