Daily Archives: March 31, 2015

History of Web Application

The Figure below clearly depicts the exact evolution of web application all the way from its humble beginning in early 90’s to the current state.

History of Web
Evolution of Web (Copyright Raytheon Company)

It’s very hard to clearly separate Web 1.0 from web 2.0 as there wasn’t anything different which got introduced in Web 2.0. That’s the reason the figure above clearly doesn’t put in a timeline as these are not very clearly defined. Having said that, it evident from the figure that, over the last few decades there has been substantial change in how we see web sites/ applications. When the web initially started, these were not called as applications; rather these were called as sites, with static content and hyperlinks which allows users to navigate from one content page to another. After that came the existence of CGI and Servlets which allowed these static sites to become dynamic and more personalized. These sites slowly started calling themselves as applications as they start to do some basic stuff which a client server application could do for a user. The scene of web applications quickly changed with the introduction of MVC frameworks (In the world of Java Struts was one of the initial MVC frameworks) and the templating engines. These changed the way we looked at web applications and there was a huge rise in people adopting it to make web applications for businesses. With the introduction of Web 2.0 standards, another important addition to the web came into existence in the form of AJAX, which helped web applications to render parts of its page rather than generating the whole page at once. This made web more rich, faster and importantly brought about good user experience. With web 2.0 came into existence new standards (HTML5, CSS3 etc.) and these completely changed this space and a new paradigm shift began to be thought through in the form on client side MVC frameworks.

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