Among all kinds of web pages, the web application is the one with the fastest growth in usage. So, we will take a deep dive into this area by developing a really nice web application. Actually, Bootstrap was mainly designed for this type of application, since it was developed at first for the Twitter web application.
Therefore, in this chapter and in the next ones, we will take the reverse path. Instead of developing Bootstrap for Twitter, we will develop an app like Twitter with Bootstrap. With that, we will touch upon even more components and elements of Bootstrap, as follows:
This chapter will be a bit more difficult, but I believe you are ready for this. So, can you build a web app?
Web applications came from the mix of an application and a browser, of course! Basically, a web application is a client application that runs on a web browser. Thus most of the processes are done on the client machine and the server is just responsible for the data processing.
This is interesting, since you can always deliver to the client the most updated version of the application, while the client does not need to upgrade the software. This leads to fast-paced and continuous development of the app.
Just as we always say when starting a new example, let's use the HTML boilerplate that we always use, keeping the same folder structure and so on:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Web App</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/bootstrap.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/base.css">
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/html5shiv/3.7.2/html5shiv.min.js">
</script>
<script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/respond/1.4.2/respond.min.js">
</script>
<![endif]-->
</head>
<body>
<script src="js/jquery-1.11.3.js"></script>
<script src="js/bootstrap.js"></script>
<script src="js/main.js"></script>
</body>
</html>