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What is the Difference between a WEBSITE and a WEB APPLICATION? Answer: Nothing!!!
I have had this conversation with many friends, and even a few managers. Most people who have dappled in desktop Windows development and/or Microsoft CRM/Great Plains have some lost notion that they know what the difference is. In fact, it's all BS. There is NO difference between a "website" and "web application". The whole "web app" stuff is something coined by antiquated desktop people who have tried to convince themselves that the more "smart client" or database-driven, or interactive, or feature-rich some web site is, its now magically transformed into an "application" of some kind. Same for SaaS and RIA and AJAX nd Mobile Web Applications......other than the SOAP protocol thrown in the mix there, these are all web site technologies and built on HTTP and HTML.
Sorry, whether its a giant enterpise-level CRM/Dynamics web site running connected to 10 GP Dynamics databases or grandma's 3 page html website, hate to to tell you...they are both websites. They spit out the same html and scripts and images. Nothing magical there. I know, as Ive built of the "sites" listed above. In both cases I used the same technologies and the same outputs. One just happens to have mnore "stuff" going on. At the end of the day, people visiting both "web sites" still see alphanumeric content delivered over TCP/IP and HTTP and rendered in your browser of choice.
-Mitchell Stokely, USA
