So, on to the back-end (not of the pantomime horse 🐴) of a web application. This was all a bit of a mystery to me at first, although I had some insights.
Being at the older end of the Northcoders student age range (I only know the one Pokemon, the one that was my son's favourite!) I had come across relational databases using Microsoft Access back in the day. But knew nothing about NoSQL.
This week certainly enlightened me, and to be honest, I really loved it. Before joining Northcoders I had tinkered with HTML & CSS but the back-end was a complete mystery. This week really opened my eyes to the back end and I liked it - a lot. MVC really appealed to my sense of order and organisation and I can see how scalable and maintainable it could make large apps.
We'll see how the front-end block goes but at the moment back end is my beau!
Week 1 of Back End
Monday
- Using Node's http API to build a server
- Use of request and response parameters in
createServercallback - Using properties and methods on the response object to build and send a JSON HTTP response
Tuesday
- Creating an Express server
- Extracting information from a request using
req.paramsandreq.query
Wednesday
- Introducing the idea of MVC architecture
- express.json() middleware
Thursday
- Differences between relational and non-relational databases
- Interacting with the PostgreSQL psql CLI
- Creating databases using psql and SQL queries
- Primary and foreign keys
Friday
- Different relationships between data (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many)
- Using JOINS in SQL
- Using junction tables for many-to-many relationships
- Editing relationships