Common tasks in web development
1 September 2024 (Updated 3 September 2024)
Here is a list of common tasks you typically do when building a web application. This list is useful if you want to master web development (the better you are at more of these things, the more well-rounded you’ll be as a web developer). It can also be useful to compare how different web frameworks (e.g., Laravel, Ruby on Rails, ASP.net, Spring MVC, Django, etc) handle these things.
- Routing requests to code.
- Running middleware to deal with requests (e.g., authentication, rate limiting, logging, A/B testing).
- Rendering HTML using a templating language (e.g., Laravel Blade, Twig, C#’s Razor, Nunjucks)
- Validating incoming HTTP requests.
- Handling errors (e.g., setting up an error monitoring tool like Sentry so you’re notified of errors).
- Bundling front-end assets (CSS & JavaScript).
- Caching requests.
- Dispatching events when things happen & registering event listeners to handle those events.
- Storing files on the server or a cloud provider.
- Sending emails.
- Deferring tasks with queues.
- Rate limiting.
- Scheduling tasks
- Registering users
- Logging in users.
- Authentication & Authorization
- Encrypting data.
- Querying & manipulating data from a database.
- Managing database changes with migrations.
- Using an ORM to make it easier to work with the database.
- Testing
- Unit testing
- Integration testing
- End-to-end testing
- Protecting against common security vulnerabilities
- CSRF
- XSS
- SQL injection
- DDoS
- Deploying a web application
- Setting up the server.
- Setting up continuous delivery.
- Creating UI components to make UI code reusable.
Tagged:
Web development