According to the Stack Overflow developer survey 2019 (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#developer-roles), full stack developer is the most popular developer title. The software industry defines a full stack developer as someone who can work on different areas of an application stack. The term stack refers to the different components and tools that make up an application.

In terms of web application development, the stack can be broadly classified into two areas—frontend and backend stack, also known as the client-side and server-side stack. The term frontend generally refers to the part of the code that is responsible for the user interface, and the term backend refers to the part that is responsible for the business logic, database interactions, user authentication, server configuration, and so on. There is also the DevOps part of the application, which includes continuous integration, production deployment, and so on. A full stack Java web application developer is expected to work on both frontend and backend technologies, ranging from writing HTML/JavaScript for the user interface to writing Java class files for business logic and SQL queries for database operations. They are also expected to work on DevOps, ranging from production deployments to setting up continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) as required.

With an ever-evolving software architecture landscape, the scope of technologies that a full stack web developer is expected to work with has increased dramatically. It is no longer enough that we can write HTML and JavaScript to build a user interface—we are expected to know client-side frameworks, such as Angular, React, and Vue.js. It is also not enough that we are proficient in enterprise Java and SQL—we are expected to know server-side frameworks, such as Spring, Hibernate, Play, and Quarkus.

In this chapter, we will introduce the following topics:

• Modern full stack web development
• Web architecture patterns
• Choosing the right pattern