Web Site vs. Web Application…

When people ask me what I do for a living and I tell them I develop web applications, they often give me a blank look. When that happens, I backtrack, generalize, and tell them I build web sites and they go, “Oh, okay!”

The advent of the Internet led to the invention of new terms that are exclusively used to refer to things that you can do or get from the Internet. Website is one of the very first and it is used to refer to a location that hosts several pages that are often on the same topic. The site is accessed with the use of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). On the other hand, a web application is a term used identify a program or application that is run and used on separate computers.

A web application can exist in the Internet or across a local network, Intranet, VPN, among other things. When a web application is available in the Internet, it is often hosted as a separate page on a website. The site can also contain other materials that are not used by the web application but are often related to what the web application does.

Comparatively, a web application is more resource intensive compared to a website that does not contain a web application. Depending on the type and goal of the web application, it needs to process the data it gets as well as access databases. Although some of the more complicated sites can be as resource intensive, most are not. This is because most sites simply show information that are static and are not updated very often.

The same is also true when it comes to the difficulty of creating a website or a web application. Static websites can be coded as long as you know HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). With web applications, it is not enough to know HTML, the part that makes it an application is coded with a more difficult language that is akin to programming languages. The list of languages includes Java, Javascript, DHTML, Silverlight, PHP, and AJAX. It is also necessary to know two or more of these languages in order to implement server side scripts that process the data and client side scripts that format the information on screen.

Summary:

1. A website is a collection of web pages under the same location while a web application is a type of application that is hosted over a network

2. A web application is often accessed in a certain website

3. A web application often needs a lot more processing power than most websites

4. A web application is more difficult to create than a website