Web Application Basics

Web applications evolved from Web sites or Web systems. The first Web sites, created by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics), formed a distributed hypermedia system that enabled researchers to have access to documents and information published by fellow researchers, directly from their computers. Documents were accessed and viewed with a piece of software called a browser, a software application that runs on a client computer. With a browser, the user can request documents from other computers on the network and render those documents on the user's display. To view a document, the user must start the browser and enter the name of the document and the name of the host computer where it can be found. The browser sends a request for the document to the host computer. The request is handled by a software application called a Web server, an application usually run as a service, or daemon, that monitors network activity on a special port, usually port 80. The browser sends a specially formatted request for a document (Web page) to the Web server through this network port. The Web server receives the request, locates the document on its local file system, and sends it back to the browser; see Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. Basic Web system

This Web system is a hypermedia system because the resources in the system are linked to one another. The term Web comes from looking at the system as a set of nodes with interconnecting links. From one viewpoint, it looks like a spider's web. The links provide a means to navigate the resources of the system. Most of the links connect textual documents, but the system can be used to distribute audio, video, and custom data as well. Links make navigation to other documents easy. The user simply clicks a link in the document, and the browser interprets that as a request to load the referenced document or resource in its place.

A Web application builds on and extends a Web system to add business functionality. In its simplest terms, a Web application is a Web system that allows its users to execute business logic with a Web browser. This is not a very precise definition, but most people's conception of a Web application is not, either. There is a subtle distinction between a Web application and a Web site. For the purpose of this book, a Web application is a Web site where user inputnavigation through the site and data entryaffects the state of the business: beyond, of course, access logs and hit counters. In essence, a Web application uses a Web site as the front end to a business application.