Defining "Web Applications"

So, what exactly is a "Web application"? Well, at its simplest, a Web application is a collection of Web pages that perform some form of real processing. As soon as you start generating dynamic content, interacting with databases, processing user form submittals, sending and receiving email programmatically, performing any conditional processing, managing session and state information, performing real-time credit card authorization, and so on, you've created a Web-based application.

What makes Web application development so different from traditional application development is the Internet itself, and how Web clients interact with Web servers. Some of the issues that Web application developers have to deal with are:

What this all means is that the Web has dramatically changed the application development landscape, and therefore traditional application development tools must be replaced with tools designed explicitly to take advantage of the Web, while also providing developers with solutions to these and other problems.