Web applications
In this section, we refer to a web application as a multi-page application to distinguish it from the SPA discussed later in this chapter.
When we use the term multi-page application, we refer to the traditional web application backed by a web server. A user accesses a multi-page application through a web browser (see the previous definition of user agent), which interacts with the web server by exchanging and requesting data – the web server typically responds to browser requests (HTTP requests) by computing a new page and sending it back to the browser for user visualization and further interaction.
We can think of a typical web application as a set of layers. The set of layers is defined according to the framework used – for example, Model-View-Controller (MVC), Model-View-Adapter (MVA), or Presentation-Abstraction-Control (PAC). Regardless of the framework used, we can increase the level of abstraction (without going into detail) and think of...