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Surely, most of you are familiar with social media apps. Whenever you click on a video, scroll through your feed, or search for something, it shows the relevant information on your screen. These apps offer a great user experience, but have you ever thought about how they achieve this?
The secret behind the smooth user experience lies in the application's backend. And what makes it so robust? The answer is the underlying programming languages used to develop it.
Developing the backend of web applications involves using various languages and frameworks that enable the creation of solid and reliable systems. In this article, we will discuss the top backend languages widely used by developers worldwide and have a broader scope in 2024 to pursue your career.
But first, see what exactly backend programming is all about.
Backend development refers to the web development activities behind the scenes. It encompasses server-side web application logic and integration and tasks such as writing APIs, developing libraries, and working with system components. Unlike frontend development, which deals with customer-facing services and programs, backend development focuses on the underlying infrastructure that powers web applications.
The role of a backend developer is to create the code that enables communication between the database and the application. They are responsible for maintaining and managing the backend of a website, which includes databases, servers, and applications. Essentially, they are in charge of everything that happens behind the scenes and that the user doesn't see.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what Backend Development involves let's look at some of the top backend languages currently in demand in the market.
JavaScript is a widely-used programming language popular for front-end and backend development. In recent years, the popularity of Node.js has increased significantly, which has led to a surge in the use of JavaScript as a backend language for web development.
In addition to its versatility, JavaScript offers several prominent features that make it suitable for backend development. These include lightweight scripting, dynamic typing, interpreted code execution, support for object-oriented programming, client-side validation, and a large community of developers.
Python is a programming language that offers modern programming techniques and is equipped with several advanced libraries that contain pre-written code. This feature allows developers to avoid writing code from scratch, resulting in faster development times. That's why Python always stands as the best option for backend development.
Businesses and organizations often choose Python for backend development for several reasons, including its support for object-oriented programming, ease of code comprehension, versatility, availability of a wide range of frameworks, and a slight learning curve.
Java is a popular object-oriented programming language utilized extensively in developing enterprise-scale online apps, desktop applications, scientific apps, and Android apps. It offers multithreading, which enables multiple threads to run simultaneously, thus improving CPU utilization.
Java has several advantages, such as being platform-independent, following OOP concepts, having extensive open-source libraries, automatic memory allocation & garbage collection, and portability.
Many developers choose Ruby as their language of choice due to its popularity and versatility. The language is the foundation for widely used frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and boasts a syntax that is both expressive and easy to understand. In addition, Ruby offers over 60000 libraries and has a specific set of keywords, making it a dynamically typed language highly adaptable to different coding needs.
Based on the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Ruby is a widely used programming language, ranking 14th in popularity worldwide. Interestingly, 7.1 percent of respondents identified as Ruby on Rails engineers, indicating that the language is famous for developing web applications and software.
Rails is a web development framework built on the Ruby programming language. It was introduced nine years after Ruby's initial release, with the primary aim of simplifying web application development and facilitating the creation of websites of varying complexity. Ruby, on the other hand, is designed to streamline the creation of new, high-performance web projects, aiming to make it easy for developers to build robust web applications.
Hypertext Preprocessor, or PHP for short, is a scripting language used for web development that operates on the server side. It is an open-source language that does not require a compiler, and it supports cross-platform compatibility, multiple standard databases like MySQL, SQLite, and more, and object-oriented programming (OOPs).
Developers use C-Sharp to create system backends due to its exceptional features, including Windows server automation. Additionally, C-Sharp runs code efficiently, making it an excellent choice for developing CLI applications and games.
C# has several notable features, including cross-platform compatibility, garbage data and values collection, and object-oriented programming. Popular frameworks for backend development with C# include ASP.NET Core and .NET MVC.
Did you know that Perl, which stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, is a versatile programming language created for text manipulation? It has evolved for various tasks, including system administration, network programming, web development, GUI construction, and more. Perl can easily manage encrypted web data, like e-commerce transactions. Thus, it can be easily integrated into web servers to speed up processing time by up to 2000% significantly!
Conclusively, backend development plays a crucial role in powering the web applications we use daily. The programming languages used in backend development are the backbone of these applications, enabling them to perform complex tasks and provide a seamless user experience. In 2024, the top backend languages to learn include JavaScript, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, C#, and Perl. Each language has unique advantages, making it suitable for different projects. By mastering these languages, developers can build robust and reliable systems that power future web applications.
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