Communication Breakdown – Why Backend to Frontend Communication Matters

One of the most difficult parts of developing a service is managing the sheer number of connected parts. With so many people, different solutions, different needs, and even different modalities in competition, the management and process of connecting these services can often be a major headache for developers.

Today, we’re going to dive into one of the largest issues for developers – managing the connection between frontend and backend and the communication between them. We’ll look at why the problem is so prevalent, identify some potential pitfalls and concerns, and offer a solution to mitigate the issue.

Challenges in Full Stack Development and Communication

Before we can dive heavily into this topic, we should first make some general definitions.

To begin with, full stack development is the idea of developing across both the frontend and the backend. This process seems simple enough on the surface, but it actually brings quite a bit of complexity to the table.

Different Purposes

Fullstack development is a tale of two cities that could not be any more different. The reality is that the frontend has very specific needs and purposes that the backend is often in opposition to. The frontend is meant to connect to external users, while the backend is meant to support the internal infrastructure. The frontend is meant to be widely accessible, while the backend has limited access and is typically heavily controlled.

To implement these demands, we turn to languages that are often wildly different. Practical applications of frontend solutions in languages like JavaScript, React, Vue, Swift, and Angular often have only tentative relationships to backend implementations of Golang, C, Python, and Node.js, which can lead to headaches, miscommunications, and complete breakdown of effective fullstack implementation.

Building on this complexity, it’s crucial to recognise that these areas of focus—front-end and back-end development — cannot be entirely separated. Frontends and backends depend on each other in a sort of symbiotic relationship. The problem is that the common ways this problem is often solved – such as utilizing “frontends for backends”, utilizing solutions like GraphQL to build continuity between request and service, and other solutions – often creates a connection without an agreed upon standard paradigm and function. This ultimately is a band-aid, not an actual fix.

Divergent Teams

There is also the very real fact that teams in the frontend and backend spaces are often in competition for resources and development time. Having divergent teams focusing on two parts of the whole is difficult enough to manage, but how do you prioritize the needs or focuses of one over the other? How can you even begin to create a rubric for that?

In many cases, these teams may also have very different languages, frameworks, and paradigms. Frontends are often made with specific languages and frameworks that backends aren’t, and this divergence in approach can lead to widely differing domains of interest. This is a major problem to overcome, as many tools only exacerbate this problem, kicking the can down the road and furthering the divide between interconnected teams.

Setting and Ensuring Standards

The initial response many have to this conundrum is to simply make strong standards and expect them to be applied across the board. While this is a big step in the right direction, it does introduce a layer of management that some organizations cannot afford, and can often reduce efficiency when applied as a managerial or framework edict.

That being said, standards can be a huge part of the solution – you just have to make sure you are managing the solution in a way that doesn’t introduce more problems that it resolves. Solutions must be framework and language agnostic, but must provide a mechanism by which you can ensure the use of these systems aligns with your expectations and standards definitions – a tall order for many developers, indeed! On top of all of this, you need to ensure you are adequately communicating these standards, as failure to communicate at this level can create a feedback loop of misunderstandings and issues with clarity.

Genezio to the Rescue!

Are you dreaming of a solution that allows you to create a complete web or mobile application – without the hassle of HTTP requests and responses? Are you a fullstack team desperate to unify your minds and remove the day-to-day worries of boilerplate code, endpoint management, headers, and status codes? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a fast, reliable, and typesafe solution you could get started with today?

Genezio is a type-safe serverless platform for full-stack development that helps you make powerful apps without the headaches of managing frontend to backend communications and team dynamics.

How does it do this?

Genezio ensures standards through strong type safety, offering a fully type-safe RPC backend solution that provides static type safety as well as dynamic type safety at runtime. This allows you to define the specific types of data on your service and govern the way in which that data is used. This, paired with powerful autocomplete features, allows you to set the internal paradigm and ensure that new code aligns with very little overhead!

Genezio also allows you to create production ready backend and frontend systems with native TypeScript & GoLang support,and beta support for Kotlin and DART. This opens up the doors for backend and frontend development with easy-to-deploy connection mechanisms like never before!

Because Genezio is framework agnostic, your teams can work together without worrying about aligning behind a solution that is really only good for either the backend or frontend. Genezio offers a rare win-win situation, allowing for rapid iteration through LLM-backed automated systems that allow you to spend more time developing and less time controlling the flow of demands. With Genezio, you can write your backend and automatically generate a powerful SDK for a variety of frontend languages and frameworks – it’s that simple.

Add on to this automatic scaling, a powerful open-source community, the ability to generate SDKs across a wide variety of common languages, and world-class collaborative tooling to get your teams started, and you can begin to see just why Genezio is such a powerful solution.

But don’t just take our word for it! Here are some thoughts from some of the wonderful teams currently using Genezio:

Using their SDK, I was able to deploy complex functionalities with an ease that I hadn’t experienced before. The integration process is so streamlined and user-friendly that even those with a basic understanding of JavaScript can navigate it with confidence. - Daniel M, CEO @ DeFiBuilder

I used the genezio platform for building and deploying my app - I built a node.js module on top of Huawei’s FusionSolar website as their official API does not allow for real-time data, and used Tesla’s unofficial API to change the charging amps in real time. The genezio platform was easy to work with and the fact that I could build and host it (for now it’s free) in such a short time says quite a lot about them. - Bogdan Ripa. SVP @UiPath

It was a pleasant and frictionless experience: from my TypeScript code to the cloud in less than 3 minutes (including creating an account, installing the CLI, and logging in with the CLI). - Laurentiu Ciobanu, CTO @Sessions

Getting Started with Genezio

It is incredibly easy to get started with Genezio – most users can be set up in mere minutes! You can sign up for free and leverage our world-class documentation to get started on your project today. We also publish educational material via our blog that can help you understand how to harness the power of Genezio to make your applications better, faster, and more resilient.