By design – a web application is any online platform feature that is user-driven; that is, you need to create a user account and be logged in to use it. A web application or web app for short, allows users to generate and manage their data on the given online platform. A good example of a web app is Facebook because FB relies on its users to generate and manage their own data. A web application does not have to be downloaded and installed to be used by the user, it is designed to be used on web browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera et cetera. When users need to download an app to their phones, they download a mobile app version – not a web app.
A website is designed for information, and it often contains several WebPages that are organized according to the subject of the information. Wikipedia is a good example of a website – it does not require its users to generate or manage its data because the data is already supplied by its source. A website can further be static or dynamic. When a website is static, it can only be updated by a person with a grasp of HTML, CSS and JavaScript at the very least because all the data is written directly into the code. A dynamic website is designed to separate the data from the code by storing the data in a database, making it possible for a person to control the data on a website without coming into contact with the code.
So, is a dynamic website a web application? I would give that a no because a dynamic website is not user driven. Wikipedia is a dynamic website – if you need to write an article on Wikipedia, you will not write it directly into their code, you will write it on a web form that you will then submit hence storing your article to the Wikipedia database from where it will be displayed on the Web Page that will be generated automatically by the dynamic system. Perhaps another notable difference between a dynamic website and a web app is that you do not need to log into a website to access it while you need to log into a web app. Based on the examples above, you need to log into Facebook (web app) to use it while you do not need to log into Wikipedia to access the information you need on Wikipedia.
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