What is a Web Application?
A web application can be anything from a contact form with a backend system to manage the information requests to a complete Content Management System (CMS). A web application will allow you to easily manage large amounts of data such as orders from e-commerce sites, file downloads, documents, images, information from other sites and information submitted by users. The application will almost certainly be protected by a secure login and will have several different roles for the registered users.
Off the Shelf Web Applications
There are many off-the- shelf systems available to carry out these functions, such as WordPress, Magento, SharePoint, Joomla and Umbraco. Whilst these systems will fulfil many tasks there will be times when they need to be customised to suit your Company’s particular data display and processing requirements. In many cases it will be possible to create a plugin, module or extension to facilitate the customisation. I can advise on this, create, install and test the additional code.
Custom Web Applications
After consultation and reviewing the possible solutions you may conclude that an off-the-shelf package will not satisfy your requirements. There can be many reasons for this such as the inflexibility of the proprietary package, the large number of redundant and complex features and the
desire not to amend the base code and so complicate upgrades and licensing or registration requirements. A bespoke web application will be tailored exactly to your specification with the corresponding ease of use and much smaller codebase. As your business develops virtually any modification or upgrade will be able to be carried out on your web application.
Working with your business requirements I can build a web application using most PHP frameworks, including Laravel, Zend Framework, Symfony, CodeIgniter. Yii or CakePHP. A code framework has the advantage in that the code is written in an accepted and structured way, allowing it to be maintained easily and by developers other than the original author.
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