Web App Development Singapore

What is a Web Application?

A web application is an online application that can be executed on any device, on any browser. It is like a computer program that runs on a remote server and performs a specific function by using a web browser. Some examples of web applications include office suites, Content Management System (CMS), project management systems, video streaming websites, messaging tools, and online photo editing tools just to name a few.

Features of a Web Application

A web app is different from other applications as you don't require to install it. A PHP development company can build web applications using a server-side programming language like PHP and client-side scripting languages like HTML and JavaScript. The server-side script stores and retrieves information while client-side scripts present that information in a simple way to the users. Features that a modern web app must have:

• Intuitive user interface
• Smart and robust support
• Scalable and security
• Interoperability
• High performance
• Event-driven approach
• Complete portability
• Cross-platform operability

A typical enterprise application, let's say CMS for an eCommerce store, would require to have high availability, data privacy, high security, data management, content modification option, and capabilities to integrate third-party tools.

So why use PHP for web application development? There are a number of good reasons for that. But let's first understand what features PHP brings to the table.

What is PHP?

Initially called Personal Home Page Tools, but now it stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is an open source, HTML-embedded scripting language used to write server-side programs. It combines the power of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripting and HTML document to help developers create dynamic web pages, websites, and web apps. You may be surprised to know that WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and Drupal “ all use PHP server. PHP application development also powers big platforms like Facebook, Yahoo, Flickr, and Vimeo.

PHP web applications can be run on a number of operating systems such as IBM, Linux, Windows, MasOS, and probably everything. Developers get the freedom to choose the operating system as well as web server while developing an application. It also supports web servers like Apache, Internet Information Services (IIS), Sun Java System, and Jigsaw Server. Whether your web app developers choose object-oriented programming or go for procedural programming, it does not matter because PHP supports these two programming styles as well.

PHP has an extensive library for data fetching, parsing, database drivers, and regular expressions. PHP scripts or codes can be executed quickly. It supports tools like APC, Memcached, and Redis that can be used to cache PHP codes and store them in the server. This enables faster loading on the web. PHP's clustering mechanism is known to offer fault tolerance which means failure in one part would not affect the rest part of the chain.

The latest version of PHP “ PHP 7 “ offers development flexibility as it is designed to support Facebook's HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM). HHVM's Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler translates codes into machine language with low latency, thereby improving code execution on the hosting server.

What PHP can do?

• PHP code can be written for your app to send and receive files and cookies to and from servers.
• It enables access to data in a database, which you can modify as and when required
• It helps to generate Excel and PDF files
• Your web application can be coded to create Sign Up and Login Features for member-only sections.
• Content management and memory management

Popular PHP Frameworks Used for Web App Development

A framework offers a basic structure for the development of a web application. They speed up the development process and provides responsiveness to applications.