Chapter 8. Web Application, Design, and First Forms

In this chapter, you will begin to create a web application. As in Part I, you will find that we get down to business quickly, but this time a bit of introduction is absolutely necessary before we can start creating applications. The introductory comments are intended to set the stage for everything else we're doing. I'll keep them as short as possible.

There are five essential, overlapping stages in the development of any application: Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, and Deployment. These are described in Chapter 1, and except for Deployment, are no different for web applications than for Windows applications.

The key difference between a Windows application and a web application is in deployment. Applications deployed to the Web do not need to be distributed to your clients; you simply deploy to the "production server" (the machine your clients connect to) and your application is instantly available.

Parts I and II are relatively independent. You do not need to have read Part I to understand the material in Part II, but, where they are relevant, I'll refer you to topics already covered in earlier chapters, rather than duplicating the material for web applications.

The requirements for a meaningful web application will be spelled out in this chapter, and the rest of the section will focus on implementation. We will explore design decisions as we go, and our general approach, once again, will be to get it working and keep it working.

Note that the requirements for the web application are similar to, but not the same as, those shown for the Windows application in the first part of the book. The goal is to demonstrate how the Web both enhances and constrains what is realistic in an application. As you'll see, the implementation is strikingly similar in some areas, and drastically different in others.

This is not a book on HTML nor on clean web design. (For a good book on using HTML to create web pages, see HTML: The Definitive Guide [O'Reilly]).

Rather than taking the time to show you the skills necessary to lay out clean, usable, impressive web pages with HTML, the pages in this application are intentionally sparse almost placeholders for the professional user interface that you'll want to design but that goes beyond the scope of this book. Our focus is not on the layout, it is on the functionality.