About Web Apps
Web Apps enable modern, highly-interactive web experiences. From financial and medical platforms to web-based email, Web Apps put the experience of traditional desktop or mobile apps directly into the web browser. Developing performant, maintainable, and scalable Web Apps requires a diverse skillset and a deep understanding of the complex technical ecosystem that powers these apps.
- Web Apps look and feel like a downloaded application, but they operate entirely within the browser. Web-based email, online banking, ecommerce, social networks, interactive maps... the list of use cases is endless.
- Single-Page Applications (SPAs) allow users to perform a variety of actions in a single interface without ever loading a new page. Social network feeds offer great examples of the power of SPAs: new content loads automatically on scroll instead of requiring navigation between pages of results. It was the pursuit of this type of streamlined UX that led Facebook engineers to develop React, now one the most widely-used frameworks for developing Web Apps.
A major challenge that businesses and engineers face these days is providing high-quality UX across the spectrum of screen sizes and operating systems. Developing a separate application with its own codebase and programming language for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android (and perhaps others) requires a tremendous amount of resources. Web Apps offer the promise of broad support for nearly every screen size, OS, and web browser from a single codebase maintained by a team of engineers with a shared skillset.