An Ultimate Guide of Web Application Architecture

An efficient, quality-induced web architecture has become the de-facto of a good product and is indeed instrumental for data and information flow to achieve desired business goals. It acts as a blueprint for data and information flow that can solve business problems effectively. An architecture with well-thought features and intuitive interface ensures seamless user experience. It also reduces the chances of the application from crashing to avoid downtime.

For any business to avoid paying through the nose to develop an application is an important goal. To accomplish that you should know what is a good architecture? Is your architecture future-proof? Can it scale and obtain market sustenance? And how do you identify which components and functionalities are significant to be added in a web app?

The list of questions is endless and determining answers to them might prove to be challenging unless you have an understanding of a good Web application architecture, its components, and modules. Fear not, in this blog, we will be addressing everything you need to know.

An efficient, quality-induced web architecture has become the de-facto of a good product and is indeed instrumental for data and information flow to achieve desired business goals. It acts as a blueprint for data and information flow that can solve business problems effectively. An architecture with well-thought features and intuitive interface ensures seamless user experience. It also reduces the chances of the application from crashing to avoid downtime.

For any business to avoid paying through the nose to develop an application is an important goal. To accomplish that you should know what is a good architecture? Is your architecture future-proof? Can it scale and obtain market sustenance? And how do you identify which components and functionalities are significant to be added in a web app?
The list of questions is endless and determining answers to them might prove to be challenging unless you have an understanding of a good Web application architecture, its components, and modules. Fear not, in this blog, we will be addressing everything you need to know.

What is Web Application Architecture?

Web application architecture is a blueprint of simultaneous interactions between components, databases, middleware systems, user interfaces, and servers in an application. It can also be described as the layout that logically defines the connection between the server and client-side for a better web experience.

Why is Web App Architecture Important?

Market trends keep changing, user expectations keep evolving, and the growth of a business is never-ending. A web app needs an architecture to lay a strong foundation, and without it, your business app will be diving in the big ball of mud architecture anti-pattern.

A well-thought web app architecture can handle the various loads and adapt to the changing business requirement skillfully to deliver a fast user experience that further improves the app performance. You can also take on several development tasks at the same time by dividing the structure into several small modules, eventually reducing the development time as well. Furthermore, it becomes easier to integrate new functionalities without affecting the overall structure.

And how about security you may ask. Well, web architecture divides the application into several blocks that are secured separately to minimize security threats, including the risk posed by malicious codes. Apart from that, applications with a future-proof architecture provide the opportunity to add new features and maintain low latency, even when user count increases.

How does the Web App Architecture Work?

All applications are made up of two primary components:

• Client-side, popularly called: the frontend, where the code is written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and stored within the browser. It’s where user interaction takes place.
• Server-side, also known as the backend, controls the business logic and responds to HTTP requests. The server-side code is written in Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.

Apart from this, there is an additional component i.e. database server, which sends the requested data to the server-side.

Layers of Web App Architecture

1. Presentation layer
2. Business layer
3. Persistence layer
4. Database layer

Web Application Components

• User interface components
• Structural web components

Models of Web Applications

• One web server, one database model
• Multiple web servers, one database model
• Multiple web servers, multiple databases model

Types of Web Application Architecture

• Single Page Application Architecture
• Microservice Architecture
• Serverless Architecture
• Progressive Web Applications

Web Application Architecture Best Practices & Tools

1. IDE tools: Webstorm, Github’s Atom, NetBeans, AWS Cloud9 are a few IDEs for productivity enhancement.
2. UX Builder tools: Invision, Figma, Sketch, etc., are commonly used today to design and improve user experience.
3. Integration tools: MuliSoft, Cleo, JitterBit, Automate.io deliver a seamless, engaging, and unified experience.
4. Frameworks & Libraries: React, Angular, Python, Veu, Express, Django, etc., are the most popular frameworks to deliver quality end-products.

Check out the original article to read more about the web application architecture.