Everyone knows what a web page or a website is, and everyone knows that some web pages are quite static, while others have more dynamic behavior. The definition of a web app, however, is more subtle and controversial.
We will start with an operational definition of a web app; that is, looking at the appearance and behavior of web apps.
For our purposes, a web app is a website that has the following behavior:
- It appears as one or more web pages in a web browser. On these pages, the user can interact with the page by pressing keys on a keyboard, clicking with a mouse, tapping on a touchscreen, or using another input device. For some user interactions, these web pages send requests to a server and receive data from that site as a response.
- In the case of a static web page, the data received is always the same for the same request; but for a web app, the data received depends on the current state of the server, which can change with time. Upon receipt of the data...
