Summary of the Types of Applications

Chapter summary

In this chapter, we talked about some typical types of applications and what makes them special.

We learned what a standalone application is and that this is the first type of application you’ll write when learning to code. After that, we looked at different types of applications that, in one way or the other, were divided to run parts of the program on different computers, and we saw that the parts communicate with each other.

We learned that a web application runs on a server but communicates with its users through web pages. We saw that mobile applications are special in that they can take advantage of the features (such as the GPS and the camera) of modern mobile devices.

Another category of applications include those that need lots of computing power and let many computers share the workload and perform parts of the computing. These are often referred to as distributed applications. We then looked at a category that’s growing fast—cloud-based applications. The benefit of using these services is that it’s usually much cheaper and more secure than if we manage everything ourselves.