Social media app development has seen a different level of craziness over the last decade. With the presence of giant social media apps like Facebook, Snapchat, Hike etc, the development of a new social media app requires a great amount of creativity and hard work.
What’s the most important thing to consider while developing a social media application? It’s the technology stack that must be chosen on which the app will be based upon. The right tach stack proves to be the key to the project’s success whereas, the wrong one will lead to a sure failure. Firstly, let us know about the technology stack.
What Is a Technology Stack for Social Media Application Development?
Before knowing the criteria to choose the technology stack, one must understand the different processes of application development. Social media app development is a three-tier architecture namely: client side or the front end, server side or the backend and the database. Apart from these, the server itself is required. Let’s understand the features and technologies involved in each section or level.
Client-Side
The Client-side or the front-end development includes everything that the users will be able to see. Often referred to as the User Interface. This Interface needs to be highly interactive and attractive for the interaction between both ends and to have a good look and feel of the application. Here are the major frontend technology stack components:
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): HTML is generally, used to tell or instruct the browser about how and what to display. The Cascading Style Sheets is used to style the contents of the pages. Bootstrap is a helpful framework for managing HTML and CSS.
JavaScript (JS): JavaScript is used for the sole purpose of making the web pages interactive. The use of the various JavaScript Libraries like jQuery, React.js etc and frameworks like the Angular, Backbone, Ember etc makes this process of development of Social Media Application faster and easier.
There are again three primary elements for the clients – profiles, feeds, and connections.
- Profiles: Users want a customized profile, but at the same time, they are not ready to spend a lot of time on it. Hence, social media developers need to provide easy-to-use tools and features for profile building, customization, and settings. The simplicity is the most desirable aspect.
The best and the easiest way to create a profile can be roping in data from existing social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. For the technology requirement, one can take help of the REST API to retrieve data from other Social Network web Design. If there is a requirement, and you need to dig out more information regarding interests, food preferences, etc the solution is to make use of third-party photo or profile editing tools like Hipster. Make use of native Android or iOS development resources to allow users add a link to their websites/blogs.
- Feed: A feed quenches the thirst for the contents to the users as per their profile, interests and previous content consumption behaviour. The feed might hold a range of content materials, including user-generated stories, user-uploaded audio, video, presentations, or photos. Create and integrate a feed into your social media app. Take help of the native Android or iOS SDKs to organize the feed as per Date and Time, Location, Social Relevance and Topic.
- Connections: Discovering and establishing connections are one of the key reasons that make users join a social media app and later stay engaged and active on it. The connection is driven by a wide range of factors including:
- Content
- Groups
- Events
- Social networks
Server-side
The server side isn’t visible to users, but it powers the client side, just as a power station generates electricity for the household. The main challenge lies in the selection of the server-side technologies for the Social Media Application.
The server-side programming languages are mainly used to generate the require logic among the different elements of the application. The different frameworks for the programming languages offer a lot of tools for the simpler and faster coding. Let’s see some of the popular back-end programming languages and their major frameworks:
- Ruby – Ruby on Rails
- Python – Django, Flask, Pylons
- PHP – Laravel
Apart from these, Node.js, a JavaScript runtime is also commonly used for backend programming.
Database
Almost every application requires a place to store the data of its users and that’s where the database comes into the picture. There are basically two types of databases: relational and non-relational, each having their own pros and cons. Here are the most commonly used databases:
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
Server
The final requirement of the application is a server to handle all the requests from the users’ computers. There are two major servers used:
- Apache
- Nginx
To develop a social media application, you need to select the server, database, programming language, framework, and frontend tools that you’re going to use. These technologies combined built on top of each other and are collectively called a stack.
Author Bio –
Sunny Chawla is a Marketing Manager at AIS Technolabs. Web design and Development Company, helping global businesses to grow by Hiring Web Developers. He would love to share thoughts on social network web design Game Applications Development and Digital Marketing etc..
