Web App Development San Francisco

In most cases a website is quite simple, they may be dynamic (i.e. have a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal) but the end result is a marketing or content based website such as a company information site or a blog.

A web application on the other hand is very complex and the web application development process is much more time intensive; it has/can have a login, multiple complex user levels and permission sets, complex data display in tables and graphs and may even have integrations with other 3rd-party API’s and systems.

A good example is net banking; or maybe an even better is accounting software such as MYOB.

MYOB was purely desktop software installable locally on a desktop computer via a CD-ROM (back in the day!). i.e. an exe (executable/installable software) on a Windows operating system on your local hard drive; the issue is it was also only accessible on the computer in which the software was installed.

MYOB now (somewhat due to cloud-only competitors such as Xero eating up their market share) have cloud software that runs via a web browser (a web application). MYOB is now available anywhere you have internet access via a web browser; the online version of MYOB is a web application.

Like anything it depends how they are built and the skill-set and experience of the developers / development team creating the web application.

Building secure and scalable software is not simple and in today’s interconnected online world is even more important than ever!

Web applications and a web apps database are stored in the cloud on a cloud-based web hosting service such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) &/or Microsoft Azure both of which we use. Various security measures are built in to all web apps that we develop and when using a robust web framework such as Django on the server side as it has core security measures in place to make it easier to be compliant. This is not to say that you can simply use a framework and the job is done! You’re not even close! To build a secure web application many, many factors need to be considered such as the industry sector and required security frameworks (such as HIPAA for healthcare).

You should also consider how the data should be stored at rest in the database (i.e. encryption approach), do you need 2FA, should their be IP restrictions in place, what server/s need access to each other (such as web or API servers to database servers) and what level of access various users should have to the data stored; i.e. who should be able to see &/or export what! There is certainly alot to consider and it should not be taken lightly.

There is many technologies available to use to build web apps, from JS to .NET and Rails; our preferred is Python, Django, Ember.js and React.

After we have worked closely with you on a wireframe prototype and design we in most cases choose Python as the core back-end programming language with Django due to its many years of robust security and productivity practices; it helps us build excellent back-end API’s with vast amounts of additional Python modules from authentication to data analysis.

We choose Ember.js due to it being a productive, battle-tested JavaScript framework for building modern web applications. Ember has been used by many large companies such as LinkedIn, Netflix and Apple.

We also if preferred by clients (or if more suited to the project scope) use React; a very solid front-end development framework however not a full-fledged framework like Ember it is extremely popular and fast.

Most web apps have 2 main parts; a front-end (the part interacted with by a user in a web-browser) AND a back-end API, the part not seen by the user but crucial for a web app to function; the back-end is the part used to authenticate/login a user and ‘talk’ to a database (or potentially also other 3rd-party API’s).

The front and back ends of a web application are both imperative and based on the design and overall system architecture of a web app will filter and display data as quickly, securely and intuitively to a user as possible in a web browser.

A web app’s back-end (i.e. the API) may also be centrally used to connect and display data to a mobile app.

These are the core components that make up a web app development project.

We have built many different kinds of web apps across many industry sectors for well over a decade now; these include web apps for healthcare orgs, enterprise apps (that usually also had a mobile app and 3rd-party API integrations, data analytics and PDF/email reporting features) and for many startups – we’ve also built several startups from the ground up including two of our own!