Web Applications

What is a Web Application?

A web application is a program running on a web server. It is accessed via an intra-net or the Internet.

What does a web-application do?

Think of a web-application as steroids for a web-site. Or maybe wings for your web-site. It makes your website soar and do things you've seen on the web and wanted for your own site.

A web application often uses a database to store information. The web application then uses this data to create web pages for display on the user's browser. The user can enter data to be stored in the database, or the data can be used by the web appliction to determine how the web application should respond to the user input. This way the page served to the user can be unique to that user. This goes beyond changing background colours, fonts and layouts, all which can be done by JavaScript. A web appliation can serve up page content according to user input. Web applications are often used for online shops.

A few things Database Applications can do for you

All the following Database Applications has done:

  • Online shops with real time secure credit card processing
  • Shopping carts for these shops
  • Document upload, some to be sold, others to be displayed as images, etc.
  • Download of documents sold after they have been paid for - there is no other way to download these documents
  • Selling tickets for events online. Again, secure, real time credit card processing.
  • Links pages managed from the database - create and remove links very easily
  • Determine which country a user is from and then displaying content for his country
  • E-Mail system mailing to subscribers entered into the database. The subscribers have to acivate before they will get the actual newsletter. They can also remove themselves by clicking a link in the email.
  • The E-Mail gets sent out as both html and text
  • Newslettes get saved to the database and can later be viewed by any users
  • Subscribers can add themselves and/or the site admin can add them
  • Form filled in by users submitted as e-mail to any number of recipients
  • Sign in to the web application to be allowed to do certain things. Users can belong to any number of groups each with its own set of permissions
  • Run Google Adwords campaigns for you
  • Set up your site to receive Google Adsense advertisements from which you can make money
  • Display newsfeeds on your site. This provides changing content which you don't have to manage yourself
  • Set up a forum on your site
  • Tell you how to make your site as visible as possible to search engine spiders, or do it for you
  • Display advertisements for pay, other than Google Adsense, on your site

How do people find your site?

Unfotunately it is not a case of you build it and they will come. There is much more to it than merely loading your site to a server. Database Applications can help you with that, as well. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Go to Google and search for the search terms roadside assistance, roadside breakdown and roadside help for pages from Australia. You will see 24/7 Roadservices in the top five in all of those for organic results - that means results not paid for. This is very convincing. But it takes hard work over some time to achieve a result like this.

What does it cost to have a web application hosted?

Tomcat hosting, with a shopping cart as the web application, but without a database, can be had for under US$7.50 per month at present. (Sept 2007). A MySQL database plus some extra disk space pushes the amount up by US$1.00 per month. A Java 2 Enterprise Edition application server adds US$2.00 to the price. One can have a J2EE server, a generous amount of disk space, more than enough memory allocated to one, a ample amount of band width, mailboxes and everything one needs for about US$20.00 per month. But that depends on where one goes for hosting. One can also pay much more. Database Applications does not provide hosting, but can point you in the right direction.