Web Applications
Web Applications are becoming ubiquitous these days as businesses strive to increase their customer reach and offer self-service options to their customers and partners. Beyond the capabilities of web sites, Web Applications provide real business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) solutions to address real business opportunities. Web Applications are often referred to by other names such as Thin Client or Browser-based software. A hybrid type of software that is increasingly falling under the domain of Web Applications is the Rich Internet Application (RIA).
General examples of Web Applications include online banking web sites and other account based financial sites like Mint, ecommerce sites such as Amazon and EBay, search engines and productivity applications offered through Google and Bing, social media sites like Facebook, and the list goes on. Almost all Web Applications are utilized through an Internet/Web Browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, etc.
Business applications that need to be centrally deployed, updated, or managed; have a centralized database or derive their data from the Cloud; or that need to expose the software to a large number of users are good candidates to be developed as Web Applications.
The key driver for the development of a software solution as a Web Application is usually the need to expose the software to any authenticated and authorized user, anywhere that user happens to be.
Reasons not to develop a software solution as a Web Application might include the need for a rich feature set that is possibly dependent on peripheral devices, and that should be made available only to a limited number of specialized users (see Application Software above).
Century has developed several products and solutions as Web Applications. We can guide you through the process of needs assessment, design and prototyping, and provide the development, testing, deployment, training, and maintenance of your Web Application solution.
Century uses best-in-class technologies and associated best practices to implement our software solutions. Our Web Application solutions are generally built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and might utilize technology stacks such as ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) or ASP.NET Web Pages. If a non-Microsoft or Operating System indepedent solution is needed we might develop your solution using the Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) platform with technology stacks like JavaServer Pages (JSP) or JavaServer Faces (JSF). In addition to the platform technologies we often use proven third-party and Open Source APIs to enhance the quality and capability of your Web Application solution -- these APIs include or are based on proven standards such as jQuery, HTML5, CSS, JSON, AJAX, REST, XML, PDF, etc.