What is Custom Web App Architecture? Once you have embarked on your journey as an entrepreneur, it becomes crucial to building a web application that can meet your business’s requirements.
You might also have prepared an idea to create a custom application. However, if you still have no idea what you should be looking for while developing a custom app, then this blog on “What is Custom App Development?” will help you understand.
Read: Web App Development Ideas
After finalizing the idea, its objective, and defining your requirements, getting the architecture right is also significant. But that doesn’t make clear what we mean by custom web application architecture, right?
So in this blog, we will discuss what custom web app architecture is, the concepts concerned with application development architecture, and choosing the ideal architecture for your custom application.
What is Custom Web Application Architecture?
What is Custom Web App Architecture? Before moving to the custom application architecture, let’s get a quick overview of the custom web application.
Custom application refers to the software program specifically designed, developed, deployed, and maintained to match business requirements and reach the set of targeted audience.
Read: Custom software development
Now custom web application architecture is the blueprint of interactions between applications, databases, and middleware systems. It ensures that different applications can effectively work with each other. Therefore, the application architecture can be the key reason some web apps suffer while others run steadily.
Frontend and backend are the two sides of any web application. Frontend contains the code that runs in the web browser through which users interact with the app functionalities. While the backend consists of servers, application logic, and databases that store data, process requests, and show the results at the app’s frontend.
Read: Use Graph Databases
A web application architecture defines how HTTP delivers data and ensures that the client-end (frontend) and server-side (backend) servers understand that data.
Importance of Custom Web Application Architecture
What is Custom Web App Architecture? Creating an impactful custom web application requires a strong foundation. In simple terms, if a business wants to construct a building but doesn’t pay much attention to its foundation, it could cause severe problems in the future, driving significant loss.
Read: Process of Web Application Development
Similarly, with continuously evolving marketing trends, if you as a business owner want to build a custom web application, its architecture must be robust, so you don’t have to re-design the components now and then.
A well-planned web application architecture can smoothly adapt to changing marketing trends or business requirements while handling all the loads. It will help in delivering a remarkable user experience.
With the ideal web application development architecture, you can divide the application into small secured components and work simultaneously on them, eventually reducing the delivery time. Besides, the secured elements minimize the security threats so the application can run smoothly.
Read: User Experience for Mobile and Web Applications
In short, with the ideal web application architecture, a business can achieve high interoperability and reliability.
Components of Custom Web Application Architecture
The major components in the web application architecture are:
-
User Interface (UI): The UI is the point of interaction and communication between user and application. It is the visual representation of the application with no interaction with its architecture. UI aims to provide an intuitive user experience that requires no effort from the user to receive desired outputs. It includes dashboards, notifications, logs, configurations, and more.
-
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript help develop an application’s UI, where HTML defines the structure, CSS specifies styling and presentation, and JavaScript helps web pages to interact with the browser.
-
Web Server: It is a system that uses HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to respond to a client request made over the web application using the world wide web. The core purpose of the web server is to store, process, and deliver requested data to the user’s web browser. Try Secure FTP software if you're a fan of using FTP and are looking for more data protection.
-
Domain Name System (DNS): DNS is a decentralized and hierarchical naming system. It works as an internet directory that converts domain names into IP addresses for the web browser so it can load web pages with ease.
-
Put simply, DNS contains a database of public IP addresses related to the websites’ names. So whenever a user enters a website/web app name like google.com into the browser’s address bar, DNS finds its IP address and allows users to access its data.
-
Database Server: It acts as a centralized database location, handles data-related tasks, and provides data requested by the application. The core functions of a database server include storing, managing, retrieving, modifying, and updating information logs, files, and other data forms.
Read: Best Database Models for your Business
-
Database servers also help deal with large data volumes, manage security and recovery of the database, give access control, and store applications and non-database files.
-
Load Balancer: Load balancing systems like AWS Elastic Load Balancer divide web app incoming traffic across different virtual availability zones to improve scalability and availability.
-
Cache: A web cache temporarily stores data in the user’s device browser for fast and easy access to the web app data in the future.
-
Messaging Middleware: Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) serves as a central point for communication between distributed servers in the application. The messaging middleware and APIs help applications bridge the gap between applications and servers for a better user experience and web application performance.
-
Content Delivery Network (CDN): For every web application that has distributed users, delivering content over long distances through the public internet can be inconsistent and slow. A CDN helps increase the delivery speed of web content like images, videos, etc., by bringing the data close to the user’s location to reduce loading time, cost, and latency. One of the popular tools used by developers for fast content delivery is Google’s Cloud CDN.
Custom Web Application Architecture Layers
What is Custom Web App Architecture? The custom web application architecture consists of four layers: presentation layer, business logic layer, data service layer, and data access layer.
Let’s look at each of these layers to understand what they are.
-
Presentation Layer
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks create the presentation layer. Users can access the presentation layer through a web browser. It includes UI components that can format or render data for users. The core purpose of the presentation layer is to allow communication between the browser and interface to help the user interact with the web app.
-
Business Logic Layer
It defines the business logic of the web application. The business logic layer helps to process requests from the browser, determine the data transfer routes, and send requested data to the presentation layer.
-
Persistence Layer
The persistence layer, also known as the data access layer, is a centralized location that receives data requests from the web application and grants access to the persistent storage. It gets connected with both business and presentation layers, so the request call gets suitable outcomes. The storage infrastructure consists of a database management system, server, tools to communicate with the database, and application to obtain and parse data.
Types of Custom Web App Architecture
What is Custom Web App Architecture? We understand what custom web app architecture is, why it is crucial, and its components and layers.
Now will be the right time to select the ideal architecture for custom web application development based on your business needs. So let us move ahead and learn the types of web app architecture.
The following are the types of web application architecture we are going to discuss in this section.
-
Microservices Architecture
-
Progressive Web App Architecture
1. Monolithic Architecture
A monolithic architecture is the traditional architecture model for designing a software application. Monolithic refers to composing an application in one piece. By creating a gigantic application, monolithic architecture often makes it difficult to change or modify the features or functions without bringing down the entire application.
In simple terms, in monolithic architecture, the web application gets tightly coupled when it comes to developing, deploying, and delivering. Therefore, scaling or modifying one aspect of the monolithic web application can impact the entire system and its infrastructure.
2. Microservices Architecture
Microservices architecture is an approach to writing applications by dividing the app into small, independent components. Each component or process in the application is called a microservice. The microservice is loosely coupled and distributed, so it has no impact on other services while updating or scaling. Microservices improve fault tolerance and dynamic scalability while minimizing failovers of different components. Microservices architecture aims to build and deliver quality web applications as quickly as possible.
3. Service Oriented Architecture
SOA is an application development architecture model that is quite similar to microservices. It structures web applications into independent and reusable services that communicate with each other through an enterprise service bus (ESB).
It is the architectural model where applications use services available through communication protocols, like ActiveMQ, SOAP, and Apache Thrift, to call over the internet by exposing themselves to ESB.
4. Serverless Architecture
Serverless architecture is the way to develop and deploy a custom web application and its services without the need to manage its infrastructure. Although the application will run on the server, cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM will handle the server.
Read: Latest Web Application Development Trends
In simple words, the serverless architecture allows you to focus on the product quality and complexity involved in scaling and making these applications reliable.
5. Progressive Web App
The concept of progressive web apps was introduced in 2015 by Google. PWAs aimed to offer a native yet rich user experience by providing improved reliability, capabilities, and installation. PWAs are compatible with every browser and therefore run on any device. These apps can work smoothly even with a poor internet connection or offline mode.
Conclusion
So that was all for the blog. We hope you have learned the types, components, and layers in custom web application architecture. You might also have decided which architecture will become the strong foundation for your custom web application.
However, if you still have some queries and want answers, get in touch with our team of experts who will resolve your concerns.
Moreover, to build a custom web application to expand your business’ reach, then the best thing you can do is hire developers from companies like Decipher Zone Technologies, having several experienced and skilled developers.