00:00:02 Welcome to the backend part of the course.

00:00:04 In this lesson, I wanted to take some of your time to discuss how we'll approach developing the backend, or rather thinking about architecting it.

00:00:14 Not immediately diving into code like a coding monkey, but rather think about the both high-level and low-level architecture of your backend system.

00:00:23 First things first, you need to define the requirements.

00:00:26 Let's discuss this illustration right here.

00:00:28 We have a client which talks to a web server, which talks to the application server, which then talks to the database, and vice versa.

00:00:36 In typical applications, you would have a client which would be, for example, a React applications, which only works on the client side.

00:00:44 Then you would have an API, which would act as some kind of a server that you talk to, which then makes requests to a database.

00:00:51 In Next.js applications, we are automatically covering both the client as well as the backend side, because it allows us to do both through server actions.

00:01:01 And in a way, we're also covering the database with the Next.js as we have such an easy way to make a connection to it and immediately extract what we want.

00:01:10 It's super convenient.

00:01:12 And once we dive into it, you'll start to love it.

00:01:14 But now let's talk specifically about setting up our backend and database architecture.

00:01:20 But first you have to ask yourself, what is the main goal of the application?

00:01:24 You have to define the requirements.

00:01:27 And you can do that by determining what your application needs.

00:01:31 And the first way to do that is to identify the main goal.

00:01:36 Is the application a content-based app, maybe a blog or something?

00:01:41 Is it an e-commerce platform or a social media application?

00:01:46 What actions will users perform?

00:01:49 Maybe some social application actions like post, comment, or like.

00:01:53 Or maybe some e-commerce actions like create user accounts, manage product catalogs, and deal with payment systems.

00:02:01 And finally, you have to identify data requirements.

00:02:04 Do we have to store images and files?

00:02:06 Do we have to store user-generated content?

00:02:09 Or maybe transaction histories?

00:02:11 It's important to answer all of these questions to form a proper data flow between your server and your database.

00:02:19 You have to plan how the data will move within your system.

00:02:24 This means figuring out the core entities in our application, such as collections in MongoDB.

00:02:30 We're going to have a collection for users.

00:02:33 We're going to have a collection for maybe products or orders, or maybe for questions within our Stack Overflow application.

00:02:41 You have to define and think about the structure of our application, and also, take a look at this, define the relationships between those structures.

00:02:51 For example, a user might have multiple posts, but each post belongs to only one user.

00:02:58 And you'll also have to think about scalability and performance from the start.

00:03:03 Always make sure that you build your applications in a scalable way so that you can scale to more users, more posts, and more data incrementally.

00:03:12 I know that this was a very high level overview of how to think in backend, but immediately in the next lesson, we'll dive into the practical setup of

00:03:21 MongoDB and Mongoose.

00:03:22 And then later on, we'll dive deeper into explaining the database structure of our specific application.

00:03:28 I hope you're excited.

00:03:29 Let's go ahead and set up that backend.