Application development encompasses the full cycle involved in planning and building an application, from inception to maintaining the released application. As we mentioned earlier, this is often referred to as the software development life cycle (SDLC); a topic that's investigated in Chapter 2.

Enterprise Applications

Applications can be classified by the size of the target audience, for example:

• Desktop – 1 user

• Workgroup – 2-99 users

• Department – 100-999 users

• Division – 1,000-9,999 users

• Enterprise – 10,000+ users

Web applications may have hundreds of thousands of users and so, from a design and engineering perspective, are usually treated as enterprise applications.

In these definitions the number of users associated with each size is somewhat arbitrary, because the complexity of the application also has a bearing on its classification. The reason we mention these classifications is that each significant increase in target audience size also increases the challenges that must be overcome when building the application. For example, simply having a second user introduces the problem of having one user overwrite changes made by another.