Summary

In this chapter, we have talked about some typical types of applications and what makes them special.

We learned what a standalone application is and that this is the first type of application you will write when learning to program. After that, we looked at different types of applications that, in one way or the other, were pided to run parts of the program on different computers, and we saw that the parts communicate with each other.

We learned that a web application runs on a server but communicates with its users through web pages. We saw that mobile applications are special in that they can take advantage of the features of modern mobile devices including smartphones and tablets, such as the GPS and the camera.

Another category of applications is those that need lots of computing power and let many computers share the workload and perform parts of the computing. These are often referred to as distributed applications. Then we looked at a category that is growing fast, and that is cloud-based applications. The benefit of using these services is that it is usually much cheaper and more secure than if we manage everything ourselves.

Finally, we talked about a couple of other categories: system software, programming software, and serverless applications.

All software will need to be written by programmers and, in this chapter, we saw that applications can come in many forms. You have different resources available to suit your application development needs. As a developer, you can specialize in one or a couple of categories, or you can choose to jump between technologies. No matter what you choose, the challenges will be very different depending on what type of application you are currently developing.

In the next chapter, we will take a closer look at what a software project is and how we can structure our code as our projects get larger. We will also talk about some details that have to do with problems we might run into as our projects grow, and how we can resolve those issues.