Remember when a program was termed a “GUI Application” - a program with a Graphical User Interface? It had features like menus that “dropped-down” (or “popped up”), scroll bars to reveal more of the virtual surface area, a pointing device (still called a cursor), and lots and lots of Drag & Drop. Thankfully, that moniker has mostly died. Now it is time another term to fall by the wayside – the Web Application.
What is a Web Application?
Just what is a web application, anyway. An application delivered over the web? A Java applet, flash, or silverlight program running in a browser? How about HTML+Javascript with lots of Ajaxy asynchronous updating? What about plain old static HTML pages with hyperlinks to navigate between them?
Who are Web Developers?
Just who are these web developers? Are they PHP junkies, ASP.net gurus, Flex monkeys? Are the real web developers HTML+CSS+JavaScriptors? Rails developers? Web site designers? What about a C++ application that runs locally yet stores data in the cloud or communicates with other instances on the internet? Is the twitter client a web application?
The ubiquitous internet makes every application a web application. The term has lost its meaning, and the term must die.
Just like “GUI”. If an application requires a user interface, it will be a graphical one. If an application requires communication between computers, or presence on more than one computer, it will use the “Web”. In one way or another. Server side, client side, I don’t care. These days, every “application” is a “web application”.