Web application concepts
What is a web application?
A web application, or web app for short, is a program that is created using scripting. It usually runs in a webpage.
Specifically, a web application is a dynamic web page. Whereas a static web page has no form of interactivity and so only uses HTML and CSS (HyperText Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets respectively), a dynamic web page contains elements that allow the user to interact with a website. A common example is a website containing a database of login information, for example.
Client-side vs. server-side
Many web applications use both client-side and server-side features:
- The client-side is the user interface of the application where the application is displayed in the browser using HTML, CSS and/or JavaScript. For example, data validation, advertising and the handling of cookies are all done from the client-side.
- The server-side stores and processes the bulk of the data and source code using languages such as, but not limited to, SQL, PHP and Ruby. The most common function to happen server side is the querying and modifying of a database, though news feeds are also updated from the server-side.
