Web development vs Software development

What is web development?

Web development is a broad term for the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet or an intranet. The Web development process includes Web design, Web content development, client-side/server-side scripting and network security configuration, among other tasks.

What does a web developer do?

1. Client-side scripting - When you are accessing a website, you are known as a user or a client. So web applications or computer programs executed by a user's web browser are referred to as client-side scripts. That means the program requests any files it needs to run from the web server, and then runs within the client's web browser. This allows a webpage to have unique and alternating content depending on a user's input or other variables. Ajax, Flash, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML5, and CSS3 are some examples of popular languages, plugins and libraries used in client-side scripting.

2. Server-side scripting - In contrast to client-side scripts, server-side scripts are executed on the web server whenever a user requests a document or service. The server then produces the document, usually in the form of HTML, which can be read by the client's browser. The document sent to the browser may often contain client-side scripts. ASP.NET, PHP, Java, ColdFusion, Perl, Python, and Ruby are examples of languages used for server-side coding.

3. Database Technology - For any website to function on the Internet, it must be hosted within a database on a webserver. The database contains all the files required for a website and its applications to function. Websites typically use some form of a relational database management system (RDBMS), the leading RDBMS options are Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Open-source RDBMS are also very popular, led by MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.

What is Software Development?

A software development process is a framework that is used to structure, plan, and control the process of developing information systems. There are two basic camps of software development: Applications Development and Systems Development. Applications Development is focused on creating programs that meet the users' needs. These can range from mobile phone apps, to high-production video games, to enterprise-level accounting software. Systems Development is focused on creating and maintaining operating systems using life-cycle development. Systems Development often involves network operability and data security.

What does a software developer do?

Requirements Analysis - Extracting the requirements of a desired software product is the first task in creating it. While customersprobably believe they know what the software is to do, it may require skill and experience in software engineering to recognize incomplete, ambiguous or contradictory requirements.

Specification - Specification is the task of precisely describing the software to be written, in a mathematically rigorous way. In practice, most successful specifications are written to understand and fine-tune applications that were alreadywell-developed, although safety-critical software systems are often carefully specified prior to application development. Specifications are most important for external interfaces that must remain stable.

Software architecture - The architecture of a software system refers to an abstract representation of that system. Architecture is concerned with making sure the software system will meet the requirements of the product, as well as ensuring that futurerequirements can be addressed.

Implementation - Anyone can come up with ideas, but a developer will be able to turn those ideas into something tangible. Even if you only want to work on the design aspects of software, you should have some familiarity with coding and be able to create basic prototypes. There are a huge variety of programming languages that you can teach yourself. Some of the more useful and important ones include: C, C++, Python, Java, PHP, C# etc.

Testing - Testing of parts of software, especially where code by two different engineers must work together, fallsto the software engineer.

Documentation - An important task is documenting the internal design of software for the purpose of future maintenanceand enhancement.

Training and Support - A large percentage of software projects fail because the developers fail to realize that it doesn't matter how much time and planning a development team puts into creating software if nobody in an organization ends up using it. People are occasionally resistant to change and avoid venturing into an unfamiliar area, so as a part of the deploymentphase, its very important to have training classes for the most enthusiastic software users,shifting the training towards the neutral users intermixed with the avid supporters, and finally incorporate the rest ofthe organization into adopting the new software. Users will have lots of questions and software problems which leads to the next phase of software.

Maintenance - Maintaining and enhancing software to cope with newly discovered problems or new requirements can takefar more time than the initial development of the software. Not only may it be necessary to add code that does not fit theoriginal design but just determining how software works at some point after it is completed may require significant effort by a software engineer. About 60% of all software engineering work is maintenance, but this statistic can be misleading. A small part of that is fixing bugs. Most maintenance is extending systems to do new things, which in many ways can be considerednew work.