There is a very crucial question that lingers in a budding developer’s mind: What exactly is web application development and why do I even need to worry about it?
As we all are aware, technology is ever-changing and new things emerge out of the dust to offer our users a welcoming and enriching experience on our website. A web application is like a program that runs in your browser, performs certain tasks, and is visually perceived as a website.
Table of Contents
Introduction
To be a web app developer, you first need to be well aware of the basics trifecta – HTML, CSS and JavaScript after which you should move on to understanding what goes behind the scenes of web development and how you can create your own.
Web Application Architecture
To understand how your web app functions: how it interacts with the user, how it interacts with the database and how is it able to perform tasks based on user interactions with your application, you need to understand the architecture of web apps.
When the user first arrives on your web app, he witnesses the user interface of the website moves around for a while and then starts clicking buttons you have cleverly and beautifully put on your website. Let’s imagine that you have created an application that provides the users with a list of the top 10 movies to watch and there is a button on your website that says ‘fetch the movies’.
Now, when the user clicks the ‘fetch the movies’ button, a request will be sent to the server for your web app to go and fetch the required movies. The server will now send in a response with the required movies to the browser where your web app is and the response will be executed which will be displayed to the user in the form of a list of the required top 10 movies.
A web app architecture does not only take care of the communication process between the client and server but is also responsible for maintaining the robustness of the web app, optimising the performance of the web app, promoting the reliability of the web app and securing the web app from malicious attacks and hackers.
Pretty important, isn’t it?
Components Of A Web Application
- Components that are responsible for UI and UX design of the web application: While these components are not directly responsible for altering the programming aspect of the web app, they are an important aspect since the visual appearance is the first thing that gets your users hooked on your web app.
- Components that are responsible for the structural enhancement of the web application: The structure of a web app is essentially the client and the server-side. The structural enhancement is basically enhancing the communication between the two sides and offering the users a faster and reliable response.
- Components that are responsible for handling the client-side of the web application: These components are written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript and they make up the part with which the user interacts. HTML provides the skeleton, CSS provides the styling and JavaScript offers functionality to the web app.
- Components which are responsible for handling the server-side of the web application: The server side of the web app is further divided into two parts – the logic of the application which is built by server-side programming languages such as Java, NodeJs, Ruby etc. and the part where data is stored for your website, the database. The logic of the application interacts with the requests from the client-side and fetches data from APIs or from the database of the website.
How To Build A UI/UX Component Of A Web Application
There are several tools available at hand which can assist you in creating beautiful wireframes and prototypes when you are in the designing phase of your web app. These tools include Figma, AdobeXD and Sketch. The sky’s the limit to your imagination when you’re working with designing.
Often this particular part is overlooked when developers focus on incorporating more features into their website but what will make your user stay and call your website nice is how your website will look when he first lands on it. Remember, the first five seconds are very crucial if you wish to retain and increase the number of users who visit your website.
How To Handle The Client-Side Of A Web Application
To enhance the client-side of a web app, you need to be well versed with JavaScript. JavaScript offers several ways with which you can enhance the user’s interaction with your website. Make sure your web app is responsive because you will be looking at various users who will be using several different devices and you want to achieve perfection at each step.
To ensure your website is responsive, make sure you are well versed with the concepts of media queries, flexbox and grids. You can also use web frameworks like Bootstrap, React, Vue and Angular to enhance the frontend of your web application even more in terms of code, performance and visibility.
How To Handle The Server-Side Of A Web Application
To start creating the server side of your web application, you first need to identify which language and framework would suit your purpose. The language of course needs to be something you are comfortable with.
Talking about the features and functionalities you need to offer on your server-side part is things like interacting with the database, performing activities based on the user input, establishing communication between the server-side and the client-side, saving and retrieving data, user authentication and authorisation etc.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you are a business and you wish to develop a web application without hiring a developer or a designer, WordPress and Shopify are the best platforms to develop your web application.
A good example of Web Application can be applications by Google and Microsoft 365 such as sheets, docs, Powerpoint etc.
Yes, Amazon is both a web and a mobile application.
Yes, Netflix is both a web and a mobile application.
The most used web frameworks include ruby on rails, laravel, django, asp.net, express, spring, angular, ember, meteor, vue etc.
Conclusion
A perfect web application is a proper amalgamation of great UI/UX, front-end frameworks and backend languages. The web application must offer the best of both worlds, it should be easy to use software for the user and should also not over-burden the server. The logic of the application should be of prime quality and with a minimum number of bugs. It should give a fast response to the user and should comply with the latest trends and standards of building web applications.
By Pooja Gera
