In general terms web application development means creating specialized functionality for your website. What this functionality entails is really only limited by your desires, imagination, and budget.
Usually what customers need are a number of back-end administration forms to collect and manage business data or specialized ways of displaying their products to customers. But the trends in web development are bringing an ever increasing number of desktop like applications to the web. Web 2.0 development frameworks like Symphony for PHP and Jquery for Javascript are just a couple that make this process much less time consuming.
This area also includes extending existing web applications, for example we added special functionality to an online ticketing system so the box office managers were able to offer multiple levels of discounts and restrictions to their ticket sales. We've done quite a few thing is this area so its just easier to provide a list of examples.
A server side graphics engine similar to the product offered by Scene7 based on PHP and imagemagick capable of swapping colors of a product dynamically on the server and then streaming the new image to the browser.
A server side text rendering library capable of streaming text as graphics with size, font, color, stroke, and a number of effect options like arch and text on a circle.
Tools for managing a large number of products, server image processing ensures the client needs to only upload the product image once while making any size of preview available to the end user.
Custom shopping cart to handle complex pricing and product attributes that could not be handled effectively in any out of the box solutions. We're a big fan of a couple of open source shopping carts but sometimes the job demands reinventing the wheel.
Complex user interfaces incorporating the latest "web 2.0" functionality such as AJAX and dynamic html to create the appearance of a real time application that doesn't have to reload the entire page to update content. The best thing about this technology is it brings functionality that was once reserved to to Flash, but can now be accomplished without any "plugins" enabled.
Interfaces for online shipping charges and credit or gift card charges.
Currently we have a couple in house products under development that bring a true rich "windows" like interface to the web. This is the stuff we're really excited about because we believe the future is a boundless place where access to your data or applications is not limited by which computer your at or operating system you use.
