Web Applications

What are web applications?

A web application is a special form of client-server application where we have a client that interacts with a user in the form of a web page. The server is responsible for producing the results the user will see. It is also responsible for accepting and processing the input from the user.

This process works something like this:

1. Let’s say a user is visiting a website and is prompted to log in. They would enter their user name and password. When they press the “Log in” button, the information they entered is sent to the server.
2. The server requests the information stored in a database about this user.
3. The database returns the information it has for this user. Note that usually, the password won’t be stored in plain text as has been illustrated below. For clarity, let’s ignore that in this scenario.
4. The server application now verifies that the user name and password are correct. If they are, it then produces a web page for this user and transmits it to the client’s computer so that a web browser running on this computer can display this page.