WWW: Beyond the Basics

22. Web Applications

22.1 Introduction

Imagine a computing environment where your wordprocessor software does not reside on your PC's hard disk. Instead, the executable code sits on a remote server. That server might be owned by your corporation or government agency, and might only be a short walk from your desk. Or the server could be owned by the developer of the wordprocessor software and might be physically located hundreds, even thousands of miles away. Imagine that the wordprocessor works equally well on your Intel-based PC or your Macintosh, is always the newest version, and costs the same regardless of the operating system. In a sense the network is the operating system, and your enterprise network is the part of the World-Wide-Web that's behind your firewall.

Vision propounded by Scott MacNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems

Web applications are applications designed to allow any authorized user, with a WWW browser and an Internet connection, to interact with them. By their nature, web applications are platform-independent and leverage off the accessibility of the Web. In the Web environment, hundreds of thousands of distributed servers behave like a single application. This is created by introducing four new technologies on top of the existing Internet infrastructure [Orfali96a]: graphical Web browsers, the HTTP RPC, HTML-tagged documents, and the URL global naming convention.

In this chapter we will examine how the Web will change the applications and the way users interact with them. In the first section we will look at the current state of the WWW. In the second section we will present the Web applications in the context of the Web environment. In the third section we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of accessing applications over the Web. In the fourth section we will examine some of the building blocks for Web applications. Finally, in the fifth section we will look at some development tools for creating Web applications.

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Copyright © 1996 Constantinos Phanouriou, All Rights Reserved

Constantinos Phanouriou <phanouri@vt.edu>
Last modified: Fri Nov 26 10:00:00 1996