Full Stack Development- Class 1 - Introduction to Syllabus and MERN Stack

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language

HTTP - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

JS - Javascript

WWW was invented by tim berners lee in 1989 innovating on key technologies like HTML, HTTP and URI.

URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier.

This is the link to the first webpage ever on the WWW. (Link)

While the Internet grew rapidly after 1993 when CERN made the www software free to use, the launch of Windows 95 gave it an impetus that is felt even today.

World wide web grew rapidly and search engines like yahoo became the primary engines of web search. Google with its page rank algorithm provided an alternative search that rated popularity of search engines based on their reputation calculated by incoming links from other popular sites.

HTML pages were emitted by the servers and displayed in programs called the browser. The internet explorer, Netscape navigator, safari and Mozilla Firefox were some of the popular browsers.

Browsers were improving rapidly. Windows NT and Linux with several of its flavors were popular choices of server OS.

After around 30 years of the rise in popularity of the www, the landscape now is entirely different.

CSS was primarily used for styling. JS was used to modify the attributes of the HTML elements.

JavaScript was a language script embedded in the html and in the front end it made changes to pages by responding to events like for example, clicks or window resize, by doing some simple changes in properties of elements like for example, changing the color of visited pages from blue to red(to denote visited).

Around 2008 java script has started to be used to run the backend server. NodeJS made its entry into the programming world where writing servers in JavaScript became possible. Popularity of JS grew by leaps and bounds because people saw value in it. They wanted to learn how to program the front end animations and styling changes.

Technologies like AJAX(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) made updating parts of the website easier without entire page refreshing. Progressive Web Apps were installable on desktops and didn't need separate development on various platforms. Single page applications a type of web application that loads a single HTML page and dynamically updates content via JavaScript as the user interacts with it, eliminating full page reloads.

Front end frameworks like Vue JS, React JS and Angular JS gave birth to a new breed/designation of front end engineers. AngularJS has lost preeminence to react-js though.

Flutter framework from google programmed in Dart gained popularity as it provided native UI experience on android and allowed people to design front end once and run on a variety of devices/browsers/mobiles from a single code base.

MERN stack is an acronym for MongoDB, ExpressJS, ReactJS and NodeJS. MongoDB is a NoSQL database technology relying its own specialized binary representation of JSON called BSON (Binary JSON) as its native data format for storing data on disk, in memory, and over the network.

MongoDB supports GraphQL as a query language. ReactJS is the front end framework that has features like hot reload, server side rendering, virtual dom, dom diffing etc.

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment letting developers run JavaScript in server and have a development environment in the frontend.