Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Approaches to Web Application Development

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Taxonomy of web application approaches and frameworks

• Comparative survey of approaches and frameworks

OBJECTIVES

• Introduce the taxonomy of web application approaches and frameworks.

• Discuss the differences between programmatic, template, and hybrid approaches, and the compromises associated with these approaches.

• Clarify the distinction between frameworks and approaches.

• Offer a comparative survey of popular approaches and frameworks.

• Use examples to illustrate the advantages and drawbacks of individual approaches and frameworks.

It is neither desirable nor practical to design and develop every new web application from the ground up. We would have to keep building the same functional components that accept and interpret requests, authenticate and authorize users, access and transform requested data, and construct and transmit final responses. Many of these components would be identical across different applications. Web servers provide application developers with well-defined endpoints – the acceptance of requests and transmission of responses. Some servers lay the basic groundwork for building and deploying web applications (as discussed in Chapter 6). In practice, such groundwork is too basic to facilitate development and deployment of sophisticated applications.

In this chapter, we classify and analyze various strategies for building web applications, distinguishing between approaches and frameworks. We define approaches ...