Main Concepts

Frontend

The frontend (client side) is the portion of the application that the user interacts with in their web browser. The frontend is a Single Page Application (SPA) meaning that the application loads a single HTML page and dynamically updates that page as the user interacts with the app. This application is built using the populate framework React (https://reactjs.org/) and the popular design library Material-UI (https://material-ui.com/).

For more information on React, please refer to the LRE Knowledge Base React page or the official React website (https://reactjs.org/).

Backend (API)

The backend (server side) handles all things data in our application and is built using Node.js (https://nodejs.org/en/) and the framework Express (https://expressjs.com/). Express allows us to quickly spin up an API with endpoints for all of our data reading/writing needs. The backend of the application allows us to interface with our database and handles how the frontend can read/write/update/delete data from the database. For this example, we are using a PostgreSQL database and the node module Sequelize to interface with the database. Sequelize (http://docs.sequelizejs.com/) is ORM (object-relational mapper) that makes it very easy to perform CRUD operations and interface with any relational database (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and Microsoft SQL Server) through a Node.js application. The backend API is setup to serve as a good starting point for most use cases.