Basics of a Web Application - ablealias/asp.net GitHub Wiki

A Web Application is unlike a standard Windows Application. Web Applications hosted on a Web Server and accessed via a Web Browser application on a client machine. The communication between a Web Server and Web Browser is happening through HTTP service. A typical communication process between browser and server can be generalized into the following steps,

1. A user uses his Web browser to initiate a request for a Web Server resource (it might be a web page, a file, an image...)
2. HTTP is used to send a GET request to the Web Server
3. The Web Server process the GET request on the server (typically locating the requested code file and running it)
4. The Web Server then sends a response back to the Web browser. The same HTTP protocol is used to send the HTTP response back to the Web browser.
5. The user's Web browser then process the response (typically HTML, Javascript) and renders the Web page for display to the user.
6. If the user may want to enter some data and perform an action (store data on server) then sent back the data (form data) to the Web server for processing. HTTP is used to POST method the data back to the Web server.
7. The Web server then process the POST request
8. The Web server then send a response (POST request result) back to Web browser, then browser again process the response and displays the Web page to the user with POST result.

this process is repeated over and over during a typical web application session.