What is a Web Application

Normal applications run locally on your computer, that is to say that the program and the data it produces is physically located on the same computer.

Now imagine that you are away from your computer, perhaps in a different office or even another country, you cannot now access your application or data, even if you took the data with you, the computer may not have the program to access the data installed.

A web application is a program that runs on the server, and is accessed over the internet. You interact with the program via a web browser, installed on any machine connected to the internet. All data produced is stored on the server, so anyone with the required passwords can access any file, from anywhere. So what are the benefits of such a system?

Imagine a company with two offices, seperated by some distance, each office has several employees. All employees need to access the same database of customer and product information, we could set up a seperate database locally for each office and synchronise them periodically to ensure that data held at both branches were the same. This is messy, and doesnt guarantee that changes made in on office will immediately be available at the other. A web application however will serve both offices from a central database held on the server, with only one set of data being created or modified, any employee gets immediate access to the lastest version of any file. Whats more because the data can be accessed from anywhere on the planet, employess not in the office, ie sales reps or employees on business trips can still access or change the information.

If you think that a web application could be beneficial to you or your business, call us for a free appraisal.