Web Application Development

What is a web application?

A web-application is a computer program that runs inside your web browser rather than directly on your computer (by, for example, starting it from the "Start" menu).

Web applications can be stand-alone in that they are fully self contained, or they can interact with a website server computer to pass data or information to and from that server. For example in the case of an email client web application (e.g. like Google Mail™), the email client program running in your web browser requests that the server sends the text of your emails to your computer when you are reading an email. You edit an email in your own browser and when you send it, the text is transferred to the server over the internet which then relays it to your final destination through email gateways.

This combination of web application client and server allows for much more complicated and interactive websites. The ability to save data to a remote server allows you to access that data (e.g. your emails, calendar, social website page) in a web browser running on almost any computer anywhere in the world!

The other problem it solves is that a webpage should look and work the same no matter if the web browser is running on Microsoft Windows®, Mac OS X®, Linux ® or even a smartphone. It becomes independent of the software "operating system" that you run on your computer. In fact some operating systems, such as Google® Chrome OS have now been written whose only job is to provide a web browser for running web applications!

How does it work?

Simple! You place a web-application program (usually Javascript, Flash™, Silverlight™ or Java™) on your webserver and then write your webpage so that it loads it when someone views that page. Once loaded the web application can run in your visitors web browser stand-alone or else contact your webserver and transfer data or information.

Your server then runs an application when contacted. This can be a program written in almost any programming language, however PHP, Perl, Ruby and Java are probably the most common.

Can it help my site?

Web applications:

let you do things that you cannot do with regular static webpages, such as interact with other users;
let your users create content more dynamically and interactively;
give your visitors the ability to store and retrieve persistent, useful data and information from your website;
solves the problem of software updates - everyone visiting your website always gets the latest version!
allow your users to interact with your website from home computers, laptops, netbooks and smartphones in a similar way.

Example web app!

This web-app allows you to design a free favicon for your website. The favicon is the small picture shown beside the web-address in the browser and in the bookmarks menu.

Using the mouse, select or clear pixels in the image by clicking on a square in the grid. You can change the fill colour from the palette at the bottom. Once you have finished, click on the "upload" button and the web-application will send your picture to our webserver. A PHP program on our webserver will then convert the pixel data to a favicon.ico file which is then sent back to your browser to save.

To use the favicon, place the favicon.ico file in the top level folder or your webspace and then add the following lines in the <head> section of your webpages:

<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon"> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico">

Find out more!

Use our contact page and see what we can do for you!

Google and Google Mail are trademarks of Google Inc. Windows and Silverlight are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Mac OS X is a trademark of Apple Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Flash is a trademark of Adobe Inc. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.