Appendix A: Understanding Web Applications; About Web Applications; The Chapter Contains The Following Topics: About Web Applications - MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER 8-GETTING STARTED WITH DREAMWEAVER Getting Started

APPENDIX A
A
Understanding Web
Applications
A web application is a collection of web pages that interact with visitors,
with each other, and with various resources on a web server, including
databases. Before you start building your own web applications, you should
be familiar with the concepts discussed in this chapter.
The chapter contains the following topics:
About web applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
How a web application works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Authoring dynamic pages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Choosing a server technology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
Web application terminology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227

About web applications

A web application is a website that contains pages with partly or entirely
undetermined content. The final content of a page is determined only
when the visitor requests a page from the web server. Because the final
content of the page varies from request to request based on the visitor's
actions, this kind of page is called a dynamic page.
Web applications are built to address a variety of challenges and problems.
This section describes common uses for web applications and gives a
simple example.
217