For those that need something more powerful than what the web can deliver by itself we at General Web Technologies are skilled in developing web applications. Producing high level web applications is actually where two of our company’s founders got their foundations in web development. When a computer is infused with a web site front end, the power of having a web application truly shines. A web application is defined as an application which has its computing power based on a main server (our servers) but the interface to the application is sent to the client’s (your customer’s) computer, so that they may navigate and make their selections on their own computer before submitting it to the host’s computer for processing.

Examples of Web Applications

For two brief examples of web applications we will examine an engineering application and a checkout system for an online store. For the engineering application we can imagine a piece of finite element software that needs a super computing cluster of computers to run. In this case it would be impossible for a customer to be expected to log on to a website and download and then compute such a piece of software. Not only would this take up all of his system resources but also it could potentially take days if not weeks to finish the computation. Not to mention that he may have to download several gigabytes of the finite element analysis software before he could even begin running one job. Hence the advantage of using a web application is both for the speed and ease of use.

The second example is of an online store. Imagine that a website owner would like to allow her customers to purchase items from her online store by the use of their credit cards. Without the use of website applications the entire database of her customer information would need to be uploaded to the customer’s computer so that the new customer could enter their information and send it back with the entire database, as you could imagine this would not only be insecure but also be costly on the bandwidth power of the new customer’s computer. But with the advent of web applications a request can be made from the client’s computer to be added into the database without the entire database being sent over to the client.

Advantages

The reward of web application development is twofold, first the entire application or database is not needed to be downloaded onto the client’s computer as it is with a normal website, this saves on bandwidth and webpage loading time which the client does not have to deal with. The second and possibly more important reason that web applications are more advantageous than websites is that the proprietary information of your company is not sent to the client’s computer, this includes your company specific code or possibly your company specific data that you do not wish your clients to see. For example if you had a database full of proprietary information (say credit card information of your previous customers) you would not want to send this information over to the client’s computer just so that he can add his name and information into the database and have to send all of that information back to your company. Therefore a web application allows you to keep your data and proprietary code secure.