Web Application Development: The Underlying Complexities and truths

What is a Web Application?

Over the past decade or so, the web has been embraced by millions of people. In the era of technology, the web has become a ubiquitous phenomenon. A web application or a web app is an application program that is stored on a remote server and delivered over the Internet through a browser interface. The definition from Wikipedia says “a web application or web app is a client-server software application in which the client (or user interface) runs in a web browser.” The web application includes webmail, online retail sales, wikis, online auctions, instant messaging service and many other functions. In other words, Web applications are, therefore, computer programs allowing visitors to submit and retrieve data to/from a database over the Internet using their preferred web browser. Here, the web browser is a universal client for a web application. Some of the popular web applications are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Gmail, Wikipedia, and Exilend.

Difference between Website and Web Application

In terms of technology, not much. Both will use approximately the same principle to build: databases, code, hosting services, web servers, etc. But the difference is more in terms of purpose and functionality. A website serves no purpose other than content display, you can’t do much of anything there. Just see and go through it. A web application, on the other hand, provides functionality. It is something useful, like Evernote or Dropbox, or Google Spreadsheets. Basically, a web application is more interactive as compared to a website. The user interface of a web application is also usually much more complicated than the user interface of a website. Hence, there are a lot of complexities in the web application development.

Complexities and truths behind the Web Application Development

Web applications are usually harder to design and create than websites. As I told earlier that a web application has a complicated user interface and there are a lot of functionalities available as compared to the website. A web application requires more coding and testing efforts as compared to a website. Hence a larger size of the development and testing team is needed. In today’s world, better and user-friendly interfaces are in demand. Let’s go through some of the challenges in the development of the web application

User Interface and User Experience

Can you imagine your life without smartphones? Think about a decade ago, when no smartphone existed and the web was at the completely different place. But In the era of Smartphones, a web application should be responsive enough on the smaller screens. The user of a web application will engage with it for a long time if it has a user-friendly interface.

Scalability

Scalability plays a major role in terms of a web application deployment. Scalability is nothing but just load balancing between servers. It is not a good practice to throw all the load on a single server. At this point of time, we need to design a software such that it can work on a cluster of servers.

Performance

If you want to develop a successful web application then take my advice. You must think about performance first before the development of the web application. When your business is online, every second counts. Slow web applications are a failure. Some of the performance issues are poorly written codes, unoptimized algorithms, poor load distribution, unoptimized database and much more.

Knowledge of Framework and Platforms

In the fastest growing technologies, Frameworks are the fundamental part of any development strategy. Frameworks give a kick start to a development. They boost performance, offer libraries and extends capabilities. Therefore, Developers need not do any hand-coding from ground. Frameworks provide flexibility in the development of a web application. Common examples of web frameworks are PHP, ASP.Net, Ruby on Rails, Python Django and J2EE. Now let’s move on to the platforms. Developers can add new functionality to the web app via external APIs. While choosing the perfect platform, one should also consider technical skills, customization options, and analytics.

Security

Security is a major concern for a web application. You must keep security in mind especially when the application is dealing with the vital information such as payment details, contact information, and confidential data. There are many things to consider when it comes to web application security such as denial of service attacks, database malfunctioning, the safety of user data, unauthorized access to restricted parts of the application, etc. Web application development can be deliberately difficult as it involves a lot of complexities. If you want to develop your web application then you must keep all the complexities and challenges in your mind. The platform and frameworks you choose for development is also playing a major role in the development.