What's your approach to developing applications?

[eluser]eokorie[/eluser]
What approach do you guys use when developing your applications? Do you start with the backend first or do you develop your frontend, then work on your backend after you are satisfied with your frontend?

[eluser]yehiasalam[/eluser]
i try to focus first on the backend, but then you will always need to modify it when you are working on your front end, and how much modification is required will depend on your initial planning, was it complete and well designed, did you double check the ERD and so on...

[eluser]Jondolar[/eluser]
I work on the front end first. Then, as my front-end progresses, I add the back-end functionality to help me with my testing of the front end functionality I just added. Then, everything gets messed up and I work on both constantly while refining the functionality.

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
I seem to have gotten the best results with focusing on the "user experience" - even to the point of faking the real behind the scenes operations of programs to get the user experience and activities pretty well in place.

Reason being, too many times I've done all the behind the scenes work and back-end functionality, only to to need to rewrite much of it because of discoveries made during the front-end creation. As a for instance, in my present project I had a login screen, an account creation screen, and a listing creation screen. Fine, right? But to minimze the steps needed to make a purchase I needed to shove all three onto a single page - the result being I needed to change how the functions themselves really worked so that everything was associated correctly and there would be no orphaned accounts or listings.

For me now I focus on presenting a "seems like it works" front-end application, minus the fancy polish and styling, and then go from there. Its not really what I really like, its just that I hate doing something only to have to redo it multiple times.