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Web applications are quick to build and highly flexible, but the fragmentation of development platforms – and the complexity of the web itself – warrant careful consideration

In May 1995, Bill Gates wrote a now famous memo to Microsoft employees, outlining his vision of the coming “Internet tidal wave” and the emergence of a dangerous new competitive threat, the Netscape web browser.

Netscape was revolutionary for a number of reasons, but for the enterprise its most significant characteristic was arguably its support for the scripting language JavaScript. That laid the foundation for the proliferation of interactive web pages, and ultimately the development of feature-rich, slick business applications that operate over the Internet.

These so-called web applications – designed and built using tools crafted specifically for the web – are now an increasingly valuable component of a business’s software arsenal, allowing for rapid development, crowd-pleasing user experiences and flexible access.

But what is a web application? Today, there is scarcely any part of the enterprise application stack that cannot run over the HTTP web protocol, from SAP graphical user interfaces to software-as-a-service applications, says Michael Allen, director of IT service management solutions at tools vendor Compuware. “So in some sense, every enterprise application is a web application,” he says.

There is, however, still a large chunk of the stack that is not built on web-based technology, says Colleen Smith, vice president of software-as-a-service at software vendor Progress Software. That chunk is not likely to be swapped out any time soon, she adds, as few IT chiefs have the need, motivation or indeed the budget to do so.

Web-based languages, standards and development methodologies come into their own when they are used to draw
the information from within that stack into usable, accessible and lightweight end-user interfaces.

Popular web services such as Google, Facebook and Twitter demonstrate how web applications can support highly personalised user experiences at lightning speeds, on top of systems that process eye-watering volumes of data.

Platform ecology

According to James Governor, an analyst at market watcher RedMonk, speed of development is one of the defining characteristics of web applications. They can be built in a fraction of the time it takes to write traditional enterprise applications and because developers often do the testing themselves, he says, the quality of the code can be higher.

Progress Software’s Smith says this chimes with the demands of business users, who want new functionality faster, and cheaper, than they have done in the past. Application development approaches that require hours of hand-coding for every minor modification are therefore becoming unviable, she says, and web applications are one way to provide the business with the functionality it needs at an acceptable cost.

There are many different ways to build web applications. The number of web application development languages and frameworks available can be bewildering for the uninitiated. They include Python, PHP, Java, J2EE, .NET, C#, ASP, Ruby on Rails, Perl, and ColdFusion, to name but a few.

“There is a whole fragmented ecosystem of development platforms that are geared towards building applications that run over the Internet,” explains Michael Azoff, principal analyst at research group Ovum. Many of these web development platforms now include the type of features an enterprise would expect of an application toolset, he adds, from robust data stores to integrated messaging services and security.

One consequence of this varied ecosystem is a fragmentation of the market for web application development skills. According to online job site Indeed.com, developers with .NET and Java programming skills are the most in demand, but between them they represent less than 10% of the job market. The remaining 90% is divided among a large number of alternatives.

The skills that conventional IT departments already have available may inform their choice of web application development platform, explains Ovum’s Azoff. “If you’re already a large Microsoft shop, you are far more likely to consider the .NET framework,” he says.

But if your developers happen to have experience in one of the more esoteric platforms, there is no reason to discourage them. It should not affect the outcome – web applications are designed to work on any platform – and adopting the development methodology your developers are most comfortable with will be cheaper in the long run, RedMonk’s Governor argues. “The net effect of this technological fragmentation has been to drive down development costs for enterprises,” he adds.

But can the wrong choice of framework backfire for a business? In a recent blog post, Byrne Reese, previously a project manager at Six Apart, the company behind enterprise blogging tool Movable Type, contemplated why his company’s web technology lost out to rival WordPress. One chief factor, he concluded, was Movable Type’s decision to develop in Perl.

“People simply feel more comfortable working with PHP,” he wrote. “Perl is just too scary.”

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