In this section, we will examine a number of important concepts related to web-based application development in general, as well as concepts specific to developing geo-spatial applications that are accessed via a web server.
There are many ways you can approach the development of a web-based application. You can write your own code by hand, for example as a series of CGI scripts, or you can use one of the many web application frameworks that are available. In this section, we will look at the different ways web applications can be structured so that the different parts work together to implement the application's functionality.
In Chapter 7, we created a simple web application named DISTAL. This web application was built using CGI scripts to provide distance-based identification of towns and other features. DISTAL is a good example of a "bare bones" approach to web application development, using nothing more than a web...