It’s hard to imagine the world without the Internet today. More than 50 million people use it on a daily basis, and this figure is growing.

Every entrepreneur willing to scale its business and make profit goes online. A website is a handy instrument that helps companies generate more traffic, attract customers and grow sales.

Modern software applications and information systems have reached such a level of development that the term “architecture” applied to them no longer seems out of place. Creating an effectively and reliably functioning information system from scratch is no easier than to construct a multistoried building.

We bet you’re anxious to know more about web application architecture. So, we’re here to walk you through the entire process.

What Is Web Application Architecture?

So, what’s web application architecture?

Briefly, the web application architecture is a “skeleton” or layout that displays the interactions between application components, middleware systems, user interfaces, and databases. This kind of interaction allows a number of applications to work together simultaneously.

Once a user opens a webpage, the server sends specific data to the browser as a response to the user’s request. To be precise, a web client (or user agent) may request web resources or more commonly-known web documents (HTML, JSON, PDF, and so on) through a web server. Then, voila ― with these minimal manipulations, the requested information appears. After that, the interaction between a user and a website starts.

The Difference Between Software Architecture And Software Design

Many believe software architecture and software design are interchangeable things but they are not.

Software architecture is the skeleton and all the high-level components of a system and how they interact with each other. It answers the questions “Where?” and “How?”. Software architecture is a where you stop to decide:

• what it is you’re going to be doing;
• how you’re going to implement the business requirements at the high level;
• how to make the servers being arranged well;
• where the date are going to be stored;
• which components are going to be needing.

With a software architecture, it comes easier to see the big picture. The central aim of it is to identify both functional and quality requirements and handle them to improve the overall quality of an application. So, in general, with software architecture, you can monitor performance, scalability, and reliability.

Speaking of software design, it’s more about the code level design, and it’s responsible for the functionality of each module and its purposes. It’s the “How” of the software development process. Once you’ve gone through an architecture step, it’s time for a software designer to think about functions, classes, interfaces and other details the app would have. Software design is the level of details or components, let us say.

For instance, you’re going to create an API. Software design level is exactly when you write an API spec. Therefore, when it comes to coding phases, the front-end and back-end developers can work to that spec.

Thus, with the help of design, programmers have an efficient common language to find solutions for repeated issues and conceptualize them. It minimizes the amount of work they do since there is no need to reinvent the wheel.