What is a Web Application?
A Web Application is like a mobile app, but delivered over the internet and through a browser, instead of directly from a device and through an app store.
Some common examples include webmail, online calculators, online shops, social media sites, message boards , eCommerce and the list goes on.
Often a business’s web app and mobile app may have the same capabilities and even appearance.
Though a web app functions similarly to an app you might download on a smartphone, it’s not the same.
Web apps are delivered through a network or browser, like Chrome, Safari or Firefox; do not need to be downloaded;
And can be accessed from any internet connected platform, whether on a laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone.
A web app often responds dynamically to screen size and input methods.
A mobile app or native app on the other hand, is designed specifically for certain devices and even operating systems, often making use of device-specific resources like cameras or GPS.
While web apps are relatively easy to build, maintain and release to users, they don’t work offline and are typically slower than native apps.
And, don’t always ensure the quality and security that mobile apps do.
Let us understand what’s called a web application. A Web application is a piece of software which can be accessed from a browser and you know what’s called a browser.
A browser is an application that you use for browsing the internet and the examples are your IE or Firefox or Google Chrome.
We can call a web application a web server although there is a difference in the sense that a web server can host multiple applications.
But for the time being let’s call it web application a web server,
What is Web Server?
And a web server is actually a network application running on some machine listening on a port the browser is actually called a web client or more formally we call that a user.
In fact web clients are not only browsers but any application which can speak to a web server like URL or telnet they are also our clients or user agents.
So the web client or the user region communicates with the web server to get its job done.
Working of Web Application:
And for this communication and actually for any communication both the parties need to use the same set of rules or grammar which we call protocol.
For example when two people are communicating they need to use the same language and the same set of grammar rules so that they can understand each other.
Web Applications Protocol :
Similarly, in computer science when two applications are communicating, they need to use the same set of rules which we call protocol
And the browsers can speak some standard protocols like the HTTP protocol, the FTP protocol, the WebSocket protocol
There are many protocols which the browsers can speak in their standards and each of these protocols are suitable for different kinds of tasks.
For example the FTP protocol is used for transferring files and among all these protocols the HTTP protocol is the merge protocol in the web client and the web server.
