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dondi / GRNsight

Web app and service for modeling and visualizing gene regulatory networks.
http://dondi.github.io/GRNsight
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
17 stars 8 forks source link

What is the difference between a web application and service? #86

Closed kdahlquist closed 10 years ago

kdahlquist commented 10 years ago

@dondi, what is the difference between a web application and service? Is there one? I'm asking because I'm thinking about our tagline: GRNsight: a web application and service for visualizing models of gene regulatory networks.

Is this redundant? The titles of our talks just said web application.

If we could leave out one or the other term, it would simplify. I'm also thinking of adding a word to clarify, so it would say:

GRNsight: a web application (or a web service) for visualizing models of medium-scale gene regulatory networks

This makes it clear that we are not doing very large networks (which we are not suited for).

dondi commented 10 years ago

Short answer: "web application" is OK for our presentation/web materials, for the reason stated at the bottom of this comment.

From a code point of view, the distinction pertains to what kind of information is delivered over the web. A web application refers to information that defines a user interface—i.e., it has formatting, text, controls, etc., that the browser can display. Primarily, a web application delivers HTML alongside supporting files. A web service delivers other kinds of information which cannot constitute a user interface—i.e., pure data.

From this perspective, GRNsight is both, because it has both a user interface (our graph view) and a non-UI piece (the service that accepts an Excel file and returns its JSON representation).

However, for everyone else, the distinction is difficult to make. Modern web applications almost always make use of web services in order to work. Thus, using "web application" in our titles is OK.

kdahlquist commented 10 years ago

OK, I understand the distinction now. Thanks for clarifying. So you think "web application" is the better "catch-all" term to use in short versions? I just wanted to make the tagline a little shorter and also I want to make sure that we are using a term that will be compatible with publishing in the NAR web server issue.

dondi commented 10 years ago

Yes, web application is the better catch-all because it strongly implies that it has a user interface and mostly implies the presence of a web service (one or more) that support the user interface. If "web service" is used, that phrase typically excludes user interface functionality.

kdahlquist commented 10 years ago

OK--web application it is; I'm closing this now.