Discovering Web Application Requests In The Wild

The goal of this exercise is to help you:

1. Learn to easily identify web applications
2. Be able to identify how/when requests are being made in those applications, and trace the (high-level) steps they take to fulfill those requests

The exercise

1. Identify & pick 3 web applications that you use frequently.
2. In your Field Notes, or notebook, for each of those web applications, answer the following:
   1. How do you know it’s a web application?
   2. Come up with 3 ways you can make a request to that web application, and write down the individual (high-level) steps involved in that request, from start to finish. (Bonus points for using front end and back end in your descriptions!)

An example

The web application: Facebook

I know it’s a web application because it’s comprised of a collection of pages whose information are constantly changing and being updated, dynamically, all the time.

A single request:

1. Click the Profile link in the main menu
2. That tells the application that I want to view my Profile
3. It gathers all of that information
4. Then it sends me to my Profile page and displays my Profile information

Remember: web applications function a lot like restaurants

So this:

A depiction of a request being handled and fulfilled in a restaurant

works in a very similar fashion to this:

A depiction of a request being handled and fulfilled in a restaurant