What Web Design Languages Does a Web Designer Need to Know?

Web languagesIf you’re considering a career in software development, you should learn about the Web design languages a Web designer needs to know. These scripting languages and object-oriented programming frameworks are the most common languages used in software development today, and well-known examples like JavaScript and Python are used in many offline places in addition to the Web.

The Parts of a Web Framework

The essential languages you need to know can be broken down into three categories, and coincidentally, they’re the same three categories used to separate the layers of abstraction in most websites on the Internet. A typical dynamic website is a software application that runs on a server and displays content from a database in a user interface called a template. This design pattern is called model-view-controller or model-template-view, depending on the framework you’re using, but both of these terms refer to the same pattern.

It takes some time to fully understand this concept, but the user interface of a dynamic website is called a template, because it provides a generic template for the visual layout of information on a Web page. The data on the page changes dynamically as the user interacts with the website. For example, when you follow a link on Twitter to open someone’s feed, the data displayed in the template changes from a list of Twitter users to the Tweets posted by a particular user. The general visual layout stays the same, but the appearance of the website is updated to refresh the page with different text and images.

Models, Views and Controllers

The database tables that store all the Twitter users and their account data are part of the model in MVC architecture, and the languages used to implement the model are almost always relational database systems that use the Structured Query Language interface, such as MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQLite. Support for SQL database models is built into most major Web development frameworks, and knowing these languages is essential for Web developers, according to SQL Course.

The controller layer in MVC architecture is a little harder to describe, because it doesn’t have a visible component on a website. Controller code is simply the business logic that listens for user input and executes program code in response. This portion of the website is usually written in PHP, Python or Ruby, and these object-oriented languages make up the majority of the code in a Web project. Most Web frameworks are based on one of these languages, and most of a website’s behavior is defined by them.

There are also Web frameworks written entirely in JavaScript, which is the most common programming language on the Internet. Simple one-page websites can be coded completely in plain JavaScript, and more sophisticated apps can be coded in JS frameworks like AngularJS and NodeJS. There is one other language that is even more common online than JavaScript, but it isn’t a programming language. HTML is a markup language used to define the layout of a Web template. It’s given additional functionality with a theming language called Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the template languages in MVC architecture.

Related Resource: JavaScript

When it comes to programming computers, Web development is much easier than application development or other types of software engineering. The Web design languages a Web designer needs to know are relatively easy to learn if you understand MVC architecture.