Ralf's Sudelbücher

Ralf poses the question: What is an application? Maybe Im naive or dumb, but the more I think about it, the less I know what an "application" - an application in software development - is. Can you help me?...

why you are asking? does this influence our business in any way?

@Hannes: My answer: yes, to know what an application is, influences our business of software development. To have precise definitions is the foundation for unambigous communication and precise thinking.
So, what is an application, Hannes?

Aplication to Me is a set of Programs/Libraries/Data..etc which solve my Business Problem.

Let's try this deployment oriented definition:
An "Appliction for <abstract purpose>" is a deployed set of executable code, infrastructure and data such that this set is minimal in the sense that if any element of the set isn't present the <abstract purpose> cannot be fulfilled.

Example: If this blog misses it's IP transport it cannot fulfill it's abstract purpose to communicate ralph's thoughts. So IP Transport is a part of the Application for Communicating Ralph's thoughts.

Martin

@Martin: I love such general definitions :-) The only objection I have: Following your definition an application includes everything from the EXE assembly I write down to the BIOS (executable code without which my app won´t run). That does not feel right to me.

Ralf:

Have you heard of this "indirect" definition:

"There is only one application. And it's still being written."

Mujtaba.

Answer is easy as question: runs in one adress space

so could a website be an application?

I dont think there can be one definition for an application. It has to be based on the context of your business. For instance, a website is an application (alongwith its IIS and database servers). But if you have arranged multiple websites on multiple instances of IIS servers, you might call then different applications. But some of these might share a single database (or at least fetch some common data from one). Do they become one application in that case? Not necessarily.

Hmm.... this is a lot like the question, "what is education?"

We all know what it is, but we can't really define it, and a lot of people confuse it with other related concepts that exactly count, like "training" or "schooling".

Likewise we all know what an application is intuitively, and some of us know what an application *isn't*, but what exactly an application *is* is elusive.

An application is a set of integrated programs which are stored in a file as a single name. Every program does a specific task or operation but all these operations are syncronised to get a bigger result which is a combination of all these operations.

An application, in my world, is a computer program designed to achieve a specific task.