What knowledge is needed to develop WeChat Mini Programs? What language is needed to develop WeChat Mini Programs?

It has been more than three years since the launch of WeChat Mini Programs. The period from 2017 to 2018 was the period of WeChat Mini Programs explosion, and many people were working on WeChat Mini Programs. For example, Tencent launched the first WeChat Mini Program “Jump Jump”, which was well-liked by many players. So what knowledge is required for WeChat Mini Program development, and what language is needed for WeChat Mini Program development? Let’s follow Feng Chao from Dongguan to find out more!

What knowledge is needed to develop WeChat Mini Programs? What language is needed to develop WeChat Mini Programs?

What language is WeChat Mini Program developed in?
First, let’s talk about what mini programs are and how they differ from HTML5. According to official statements and the technical interfaces of “mini programs” that have been circulated, in layman’s terms, “mini programs” are actually WeChat’s improved ability to support HTML5 features and open up more system calls. For example, calls to GPS, sensors, etc. It is foreseeable that H5 products in WeChat will have better user experience, faster loading speed, and more functions.

What has changed with “Mini Programs”?
Regarding the competition between H5 and APP, there are many factors that have determined that H5 has lost most of its core product market share in recent years. One point is that H5 cannot be developed and used in multiple places at one time, but has to face more compatibility challenges with different browsers and APP platforms. For example, WeChat could not support many features in the past, so “mini programs” came into being.

A few years ago, when WeChat's market share continued to increase, I thought that WeChat's platform might provide H5 with a unique development opportunity: all H5s are developed based on WeChat's interface standards, and browsers gradually move closer to WeChat standards, ultimately achieving the goal of developing once and using in multiple places.

Looking at it today, although “mini programs” came late, they still came after all. It is foreseeable that a standardized operating environment for H5 products will emerge and the quality of H5 products in WeChat will be greatly improved.

What knowledge is needed to develop WeChat Mini Programs? What language is needed to develop WeChat Mini Programs?

What language is used for WeChat applet development:
First of all, for example, for secondary development of WeChat, Java or PHP can be used as the server-side language for secondary development. What about mini-programs? The document says that .js is responsible for business logic. Does it mean that the server-side is implemented purely in JS? Does it include database operations? Or can PHP also be used?

In fact, you can fill in your own website address in the request in the document, then you should be able to get data from your own server, so any data language can be used on the back end. In this case, is it similar to ajax? How to return the data to the front end after the backend PHP processes it?

The server-side language has nothing to do with the front-end logic, PHP or Python will do. But it is best to use python for rapid development! There will be many problems when developing the backend with php. wx.request initiates an https request. A WeChat applet can only have 5 network request connections at the same time.