So, you’ve now learned a lot of juicy Javascript, enabling you to make various components of your HTML/CSS page react to user actions and/or input. That’s great! As you’ve seen, you can get your apps to do a lot of pretty cool things already, just using client-side JavaScript. You may have noticed, though, that there is still an important piece of the puzzle missing: unless you use Local Storage, your app ‘forgets’ the user’s preferences, as well as any other changes made, as soon as the page gets reloaded.
While Local Storage is great, it’s not ideal: it only stores data on the computer from which the user is accessing the page. This approach does not allow for the app to ‘remember’ anything when the same user tries to access it again from a different device. For that, you’re going to need a real backend.
Where you go from here will depend in part on what you’ve learned so far. If you are on the full-stack Ruby on Rails path, hooray: you already have all of the tools you need to build your own full-fledged web app from scratch!
If not, never fear: you can learn how to build a back-end later using Node.js. For now, you can outsource your backend functionality to a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) company like Firebase or Apigee.
For those of you who are on the full-stack Ruby on Rails path, the next step is obvious: you get to build your own backend with Rails! In preparation, reread the Rails lesson on building an API to refresh how to set up a Rails backend that can handle JSON requests.
Are you done? Good. Next, it’s time to practice allowing your front end Javascript to talk to your Rails backend using AJAX. We’ll cover some best practices for how to pass data from one to another, but otherwise it’s up to you: you’ve got everything you need to put together those final pieces of the web development puzzle.
If you skipped Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails or are on a different path, you’re not quite ready to build an entire web app from scratch. The good news: you don’t have to! We will provide you with resources that guide you through setting up your backend on Firebase.
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