A brief history of web app
Who are the ancestors of a contemporary web app? The answer to this question brings us back to the early 1990-s, when the Internet was filled in with the text documents in the form of static HTML pages.
Later it became possible to add images, video and audio files to the web pages. But they were still static. The intention to make HTML pages more dynamic resulted in the development of the client-side programming language Java Script in 1995. It allowed featuring web pages with various interactive elements, including vector animation.
Shift from static to dynamic web pages took place in 2005 with the introduction of Ajax, a new approach to responsive web design and web app development, asynchronous web apps.
The term web app has fixed its position in the web history. But it was not enough, modern technologies required a new level of web apps, that is why in 2015 Alex Russell and Frances Berrman introduced Progressive Web Application (PWA), that are “just websites that took all the right vitamins”. In other words, web app got the functionality of the native app and the user could not see any difference between the native app and PWA.
How will the web app technologies change in coming years? Will web app replace mobile and desktop apps? We will see soon.
