Editing Web application (section)

==History==
The concept of a "web application" was first introduced in the Java language in the Servlet Specification version 2.2, which was released in 1999. At that time, both JavaScript and [[XML]] had already been developed, but the [[XMLHttpRequest]] object had only been recently introduced on Internet Explorer 5 as an [[ActiveX]] object.{{citation needed|date=May 2025}} Beginning around the early 2000s, applications such as "[[Myspace]] (2003), [[Gmail]] (2004), [[Digg]] (2004), [and] [[Google Maps]] (2005)," started to make their client sides more and more interactive. A web page script is able to contact the server for storing/retrieving data without downloading an entire web page. The practice became known as Ajax in 2005.

In earlier computing models like client-server, the processing load for the application was shared between code on the server and code installed on each client locally. In other words, an application had its own pre-compiled client program which served as its [[user interface]] and had to be separately installed on each user's [[personal computer]]. An upgrade to the server-side code of the application would typically also require an upgrade to the client-side code installed on each user workstation, adding to the [[Technical support|support]] cost and decreasing [[productivity]]. Additionally, both the client and server components of the application were bound tightly to a particular [[computer architecture]] and [[operating system]], which made [[porting]] them to other systems prohibitively expensive for all but the largest applications.

Later, in 1995, [[Netscape]] introduced the [[client-side scripting]] language called [[JavaScript]], which allowed programmers to add [[Dynamic HTML|dynamic elements]] to the user interface that ran on the client side. Essentially, instead of sending data to the server in order to generate an entire web page, the embedded scripts of the downloaded page can perform various tasks such as [[Data validation|input validation]] or showing/hiding parts of the page.

"[[Progressive web app|Progressive web apps]]", the term coined by designer Frances Berriman and [[Google Chrome]] engineer Alex Russell in 2015, refers to apps taking advantage of new features supported by modern browsers, which initially run inside a web browser tab but later can run completely offline and can be launched without entering the app URL in the browser.