Significant Differences Between Programming Vs Web Development
Major Differences between Programming Vs Web Development
• Programming and Web development, both involve coding. Web development is a bit different term than programming and it can be divided into two terms:
1) front-end (client-side)
2) back-end (server-side) programming
Similar to these programming types, programmers are divided into front-end and back-end programmers.
• In web development, developers mostly have more than one particular programming skill set. There are full-stack developers who will have both back-end and front-end skills. Mostly front-end developers have ample of UI and web designing skills.
• Web development’s main focus is web content creation along with custom designing and development approach. Bigger companies focus on creating their own websites or web platforms from scratch (so that they are not dependent on any development tools).
• Programming’s main focus is getting the logic right. And handling users actions and outcomes for those actions.
• Programming is not limited to web development. Programming is found throughout all fields of technology, not just web development.
• Programming is more widespread than web development, and only a particular type of programming (i.e.; web programming) is catered in the case of web development.
Technical Differences
While both Programmers and web developers write code. Their focuses as mentioned above are quite different. Programming generally handles the logic of creation and the term Programming is very vast.
Programming can be done on any platform be it web or desktop application its just the logic process that we term as programming. Web development is rather more focused on the development of websites and you can easily hire some web developers here.
Let’s take a web designer, for example, the designer makes a mockup of a website and plans how the website will look and feel. The designer only provides an initial design for what is to be made. The Web developer is the one who implements this design to some extent. The programmer comes into play to create some new features or tools that help in the usability of the website. Generally, once the programmer’s work is done then the web developer looks after the maintenance.
The professional roles are what sets the web developer and programmers apart, A programmer is usually asked to improve the current standard of software or implement some new key features and functionalities.
In reality, anyone who programs can be called a programmer. The debate of including and excluding people from this category is endless. But generally, the people who can write a small piece of program to handle somewhat complex logic like a macro on a spreadsheet can be termed as a programmer.
A web developer is also a programmer who can create web-based applications. All web developers thus know how to program using web-based programming languages. Hence, a web developer is also a programmer, but any programmer might not necessarily be a web developer.
Mostly, a web developer knows languages HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are called front-end (client side) or scripting languages.
They would also know some back end (server side) languages like PHP, ASP.net, Java, Python, NodeJS, etc.
In addition to this web developers might also know some databases languages like (SQL) to create databases and perform CRUD operations on them. Some commonly used databases for the web include MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.
There are hundreds of programming languages and more being created every day. A programmer who is not a web developer can know one or more of these languages. Most of the modern languages out there today have a web (API) interface to create web apps.
As discussed majority of web developers are programmers (but not all). Some web developers only use HTML and CSS to carry out 90% of their web designing need, this helps them do things like maintaining and updating the content, and these people can be called web designers but not programmers.
Besides this, there is not really any difference between a web developer and a programmer. Both carry out the same kind of work, both write code. Web developer writes code for the web and a programmer writes code for desktop software or applications.