Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

APPLICATION AND SOLUTION TYPES

When developing applications for SharePoint, remember that you have a few different ways to build and deploy a SharePoint application or solution. The following is a short list of the types of options — both historical and today:

• Farm-level solution: Typically associated with either SharePoint Server or SharePoint Foundation, this type of solution (.WSP or SharePoint feature) is an application that is installable and accessible across any site collection within a SharePoint farm.
• Sandboxed solution: Lightweight solution or feature that is deployed to a sandboxed environment (that is, a restricted execution environment that allows programs to access specific resources and data within the SharePoint site) and can be deployed to Office 365 or on-premises SharePoint installations.
• SharePoint-hosted app: Lightweight app (.APP) that is deployed to SharePoint but leverages client-side code such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
• Cloud-hosted app: Apps (.APP) that are hosted in the cloud, but can be deployed to either SharePoint on-premises or Office 365. These are either Autohosted or Provider-hosted (as discussed in Chapter 2, “Overview of SharePoint 2013 App Model”).

Each one of these options has pros and cons that you will need to understand — not only so you can choose between them, but also so you can really take advantage of all the services, APIs, or features that are available within each one of these options. You may also have combinations of a few ...