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 createServer callback
• 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.params and req.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