“Web Development” is a particular type of programming to create a web site or more specifically, a web application. A web application is a program pretty much like any other program, but it’s made available over the web and the user interface is through a web browser application like Internet Explorer, FireFox, or Google’s Chrome.
Programming a web site is significantly different than programming for say, a Windows program (like Microsoft Word, for example). Web apps run in at least two places at once:
- On the web server from which they’re hosted.
- On the user’s machine, inside their own browser.
Most web apps also use some type of a database to store and retrieve the data and those databases, in turn, may have business logic that executes inside of them, on behalf of the web application.
Any code that runs on the client side is written in JavaScript. The JavaScript may make calls back to the web server, in the form of a “web service method” call. That’s essentially just a subroutine that lives on the web server. So, JavaScript can call routines on another computer than the one it’s running on.
The code running on the server could be written any number of languages. Popular ones today are C#, VB.NET, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and plenty more.
A web server can serve the web app to multiple users at the same time. The application must handle memory storage appropriately so that it doesn’t display User A’s credit card information to User B and vice versa. Standard technologies are available to provide what are called “session variables”. These are memory locations on the web server that are allocated specifically for each user. Each time the user clicks a button or loads a new page, the web server keeps track of which user is which and feeds the proper sessions variables to the web application logic that needs to process information specific to the user that just made the request.
Literally VOLUMES of books have been written on the various ways to accomplish web development. This article is just a very very thin, intro explanation of what web development is. Please see the following articles about the other types of software development to see a contrast to this style of programming:
- Windows Development.
- Windows Mobile Development.
- iPhone Development.
- Google Android Development.
- Windows Services Development.
- Web Services Development.
- Library or Framework Development.
- Visual Component Development.
(check back later for these bulleted items to become links to new articles).
If you have any questions about this, feel free to enter them in the comments section just below this article.