Website Design Adelaide | Web Application Framework | Web Designers Adelaide | Website Developer

Professional websites have a "Web Application Framework" that is used to support the development of dynamic pages, web applications and web services...

...to make the right decision you need to know what that is.

The term “web application framework” is used to describe the software that is used to support the development of dynamic websites, web applications and web services.

The web application framework aims to implement a standard structure, for applications developed for a specific development environment (i.e. the underlying technology stack) and to alleviate common overheads associated with activities performed in website and web application development.

Website developers typically use object-oriented programming techniques to implement frameworks such that the unique parts of an application can simply inherit from preexisting classes in the framework and provide a seamless flow of data.

Also, many frameworks provide libraries for scripting and database access, templating frameworks, session management, and additionally promote code reuse.

Programming Languages

The early use of web pages on the Internet was not inherently dynamic, with early hypertext pages consisting of individually hand-coded HTML that was published on web servers. Any modifications to these “static” published pages needed to be performed by someone knowledgeable in HTML code, with the changes often needing to be made on each page of the website (i.e. a menu change needed to be changed physically by someone on each page of the website).

Since that time, new languages have been developed specifically for use on the web, such as ColdFusion, PHP, and Microsoft’s Active Server Pages (ASP). And whilst the vast majority of programming languages that are available today for creating dynamic web pages, have libraries to help with common tasks, often website applications required specific libraries that go well beyond what is available in the programming language.

Mature Frameworks

Eventually, mature, "full stack" web development frameworks appeared, that gathered multiple tools and scripting libraries, useful for web development, into a single cohesive software grouping for web developers to use.
Many of these frameworks follow the Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern to separate the data model with business rules, from the user interface. This is generally considered a good practice as it provides modularized code, promotes code reuse, and allows multiple interfaces to be applied.

Framework Components

These frameworks can include a variety of web publishing tools including;

• Template systems (enables separation of content from presentation style, and database generated dynamic pages)
• Security (providing role-based access to pages)
• URL mapping (allows more "friendly" URLs to be used, increasing the simplicity of the site and allowing for better indexing by search engines)
• Scripting languages and libraries (JavaScript, AJAX, XML, DHTML - to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites)
• Dynamic Cascading Style Sheets (CSS, a collection of technologies used together to create dynamic style sheets which are used to describe the presentation semantics of a document i.e. the look and formatting)
• Search engine optimisation capabilities (to enable optimisation of the pages for search engine ranking)
• Advanced Management systems (to management users/editors, pages, images, sections, categories, menu language, forms, modules, etc.).
• And more

Database driven websites

Database driven, or dynamic web pages usually consist of a static part (HTML) and a dynamic part, (which is code that generates HTML). The code that generates the HTML can do this based on variables in a template. The text to be generated can also come from a database, thereby making it possible to dramatically reduce the number of “actual” pages in a site.

Consider an example of a real estate agent with 500 houses for sale. In a static web site, the agent would have to create 500 pages in order to make the information available. In a dynamic website, the agent would simply connect the dynamic page to a database table of 500 records.

Templating Systems

A templating system is essentially a web publishing tool present in content management systems, software frameworks, HTML editors, and many other contexts. It is probably the most important tool (but certainly by no means the only one needed).

The templating system enables not only the separation of content from the presentation style, but also the delivery of database generated dynamic pages. This also means that variables from the programming language can be inserted into the page without using code, thereby losing the requirement of programming knowledge to make updates to the pages in a web site.

Higher Layer Web Application frameworks

Some content management systems take on the role of higher-layer web application frameworks and not only contain the main framework tools, but are easily extend-able due to their modular design. For instance, the structure of the open source CMS, Joomla, provides a minimal core whose function is extended through modules that provide functions generally associated with web application frameworks.

Add-on modules now enable these systems to function as full fledged applications beyond the scope of content management. Some also provide functional APIs, functional frameworks, coding standards, and many of the functions traditionally associated with Web application frameworks.

Summary

It is important that you know about the framework on which your website is developed as this will speak to how easily current, and future alterations, additions, or developments can be made. It affects the longevity, flexibility and scalability of your main online asset and choosing incorrectly can be a costly exercise, now and ongoing.

Please read the following pages to explore our website development framework.

Where to next?

• Read about the Scripting we choose to use
• Read our thoughts on Flash integration
• Learn about the versatility of CSS
• Learn about Web Standards
• Schedule a meeting with us