Let’s say you just have a ton of data.
“I have a ton of data!”
You might want to do some data analysis, or make some visualizations, but sometimes you just want to put it out there. You know, in a format that isn’t an Excel spreadsheet. A wonderful web page for browsing your dataset, maybe running a few searches, just allowing everyone in on the secret.
Welcome to the wild world of web applications (kind of, sort of, somewhat)! Web apps are a great way to take complex, interrelated data (or even simple data) and display it to an end user. While a lot of times you build web apps to display data to the outside world, you can also use it internally - plenty of newsrooms build internal apps that are used for digging through information.
Let’s get our build on!
NOTE: The big difference between what we’re doing and what most people building webapps are doing is a big one: we generally don’t insert new data. Maybe we have updated databases, sure, but we don’t need a whole system for adding blog posts or tweets or whatever. Our main concern is browsing.