The development of web applications is directly related to the popularization of the Internet. As new technologies and tools emerged, web applications improved and gained popularity.
It should be noted that the first web applications appeared before the Internet became mainstream. Back in 1987, Larry Wall developed Perl, a server-side scripting language.
The very first site appeared in 1991, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, who introduced a new technology to the World Wide Web, based on the HTTP protocol. The site still exists today, and everyone can view it.
It is a set of hypertext with links to basic concepts, directions of development of the resource, etc. Compared with modern network projects, it looks simple and unsightly, but it has historical significance.
For a long time web-applications remained simple, because there were no tools and no need to complicate them. Only at the beginning of the 21st century they began to gain popularity and today are represented by a huge variety.
Thanks to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Javascript (to animate static pages), server technologies (Apache, Nginx, AJAX) and programming languages (Python, Java, PHP, etc.) it became possible to make large-scale mass web applications with great functionality.
Thanks to them, everyone can pay for utilities online, communicate with colleagues in a video conference, make online purchases, and search based on their interests.
The concept of “site” in the narrow sense is associated with static pages, the content of which is rigidly defined and put online. Web applications are associated with dynamically generated content, depending on the user’s request, with or without a page reload.
Web-applications require a client part (frontend), i.e. the interface, the presentation on the user’s screen, and a server part (for processing requests, recording in the database the information obtained).
To summarize
1 – The development of web applications is connected with the Internet evolution
2 – Improvement of tools allows the creation of complex web applications based on browsers
3 – Web-applications have client (frontend) and server (backend) parts