Susan Fowler

CHAPTER 1 – What Is a Web Application?

In software engineering, a web application is an application delivered to users from a web server over a network such as the World Wide Web or an intranet. Web applications are popular due to the ubiquity of the web browser as a client, sometimes called a thin client. The ability to update and maintain web applications without distributing and installing software on potentially thousands of client computers is a key reason for their popularity. Web applications are used to implement webmail, online retail sales, online auctions, wikis, discussion boards, weblogs, MMORPGs, and perform many other functions.

Interviews: Fast consulting

SUSAN: The first book, the GUI Style Guide (Academic Press, ISBN 0122635906), was a thank-you to the programmers who taught me most of what I know about the software industry. They told me how things really worked. For example, when, in my first job, I would go to the programmers crying about losing three hours of work because of some weirdo system bug, they’d listen for awhile, and then say, “It’s always better the second time you write it.” (This is true, although irritating.) So when I had the opportunity to return the favor, I did. I had noticed that, when developers did screens, they often made the same mistakes over and over, which they stopped making as soon as someone explained why they were mistakes. So Victor and I wrote down all the things that we had been able to tell them about visual design.