Coding with Velo: Backend

Hey, and welcome to our Velo backend course.

As we know, Velo is a powerful tool that empowers you to build, manage and deploy your web applications that you create on Wix.

You can add your JavaScript code to do so, and throughout this course, we're going to use backend to create a number of different things, from our own web modules, our own API with HTTP functions, even integrate third-party services.

So what we'll do first is make sure that we have Dev Mode on to get up and going.

So since we have Dev Mode on, navigate over to our Velo side panel right here.

So we started with page code in our last course for our frontend and also for our beginners course, but for this course, we're going to focus mainly on code files.

And we can start with the first folder called Public.

And Public is where you can access your JavaScript files, so you can put them in the frontend as well.

Next up, we have Backend, and this is where you're going to create the majority of your backend files.

This folder allows you to create a few different files here, starting with a new web module.

A web module is going to allow you to export functions from the backend to the frontend.

So this is a really big key feature here so that you don't have to go to a separate API, and then you can also just keep it with inside the same editor.

We also have the ability to create regular JavaScript files, and even create a job scheduling file as well.

So this allows you to create scheduled jobs and have different recurrences of functions throughout your project.

So let's just say that you wanted to remind people that an anniversary is coming up for them signing up for your website, you can have a job scheduled right there.

Our last section here in the backend is Packages.

And with Packages, we could start with one of the new features, which is called Velo Packages.

So this helps developers get up and going without having to recreate and reinvent the wheel every time just to have the same functions work in their websites.

So Velo Packages are web modules that are put together so that you can also jumpstart some of these functions right away without having to recreate these experiences.

The Velo team already has created a lot of pre-built Velo packages like Twilio, two-factor authentication, Google Sheets, even some combinations with AWS as well.

So this is big for code reuse, and you'll be able to also create your own Velo packages in the future.

Velo also has the ability to use npm, which is the world's largest registry for JavaScript.

So you'll be able to install some third-party services like Google, Stripe, Twilio, and then use them in your website.

So you can create an experience like being able to have your customer send an SMS, send an SMS to your customer after they purchase something, or maybe even connect your website to a Google sheet.

You can also use some utilities like Lodash to make your code a lot more concise.

So you can also continue to use this search function on the side here for searching your code.

Sometimes you might get lost and want to find out where you left off or find some functions that you created.

You can use this to find it.

Databases also do connect a lot to the backend here because you might be using wix-data, which is probably your most popular API that you'll be using.

We also have a Release Manager and our Secrets Manager, where you can store your secret API keys that you have in the backend.

So our backend is really secure.

And the Secrets Manager also adds some more security to it so that you can store your API keys, and you can't expose them to the frontend.

You can also log and monitor your own functions as well.

This goes beyond the scope of this course, but we'll be able to show you some more information and leave you some documentation in the link below.

So that wraps it up for the tour of the Editor.

In the next lesson, we're going to create our own web module and use the wix-data API.