Building Your First Web App

Build your first fully featured web app using modern tools and technologies.

This introduction starts with the fundamentals of building software for the web. You'll learn how the internet works, along with the tools and vocabulary covered over the course of the following lessons. You'll learn the ins and outs of technologies like git and GitHub, Heroku, and Node.js. You'll also learn about core web app concepts like server environments, server-client relationships, and web requests and responses.

In this lesson, you’ll start with the code for a basic, pre-built web app, rather than worrying about the technical details yourself. You’ll practice making changes, pushing them to GitHub, and deploying your app to a production server.

Now that your app is up and running, this lesson is designed to help you build out a more fully-fledged web app. You'll develop a deeper understanding of what the code does by guiding you through the folder structure and files in your app. You'll add additional pages to your app, as well as navigation to move between those pages. Finally, you'll learn about the styling resources we've already included in the code. Then, you’ll practice reading the documentation and implementing Bootstrap, a popular component library, in your app.

APIs — which help you interact with outside data — are one of the most important aspects of building a dynamic web app. In this lesson, you'll learn all about how APIs operate, from protocols, HTTP methods, using AJAX to send requests, and parsing the JSON that gets returned. Then, you'll use your new knowledge to make an API request for weather data from a web service, then display that data in your app. Finally, you'll make your app more dynamic by letting your users search for the weather in any city around the world.

Databases are the key to storing the information your users generate. In this lesson, you'll set up a database with Firebase, a popular database solution, and practice the critical skill of reading a service's documentation. You'll set up a sign-in process for users to complete before they can submit data to the database. Then, you'll write the code to get your app to submit user-generated information to Firebase. Finally, you’ll read that data from the database and display it on the screen.