My understanding is that a Web Application Developer is a class of Web Developer who can build and maintain web-based applications as well as just web sites - as a regular Web Developer would do. Am I correct in my thinking or is there anything else someone would like to add?
Cheers Iain
to me there is no difference but just my opinion.
Most of the website are DB oriented nowdays. I don't imagine there is still some webmasters around making some static content (apart in universities and really small organisation)
Web applications deal with backend systems that are delivered via the web. A web application developer will work primarily with the server side environment. Unfortunately, both terms are used to describe the same thing. I generally use the term web developer to describe the front end guys.
My take is that "web developer" and "web application developer" mean the same thing, or different things depending on who wrote the job specification! For example, this web developer advert would seem to be asking for a web application developer in the sense that you described the roles.
Sometimes the distinction is made between Web sites and Web applications. SO is an example of the former. GMail is an example of the latter. The line is blurry however but generally Web applications consist of one page or a handful of pages and tend to have significant functionality like you'd see in a desktop application.
You could argue that Web developers develop Web sites and Web application developers develop the latter but in reality I don't think I've ever seen anyone make that distinction so the terms (in practice) are probably interchangeable.
There is no official distinction, it is just two different ways to word the title for what is effectively the same job.
In the case where there is some difference, it will be specific to the company posting the job. Use the job description instead of the title to figure out what is expected at a given job.
About 20K?
Kidding! But to build on what Vincent Ramdhanie said my general experience has been that the Web Application Developer job description seems to be more server-centric then the Web Developer. They are expected to know somewhat more about database design and server-side programming while the Web Developer title seems to be used more for the programmers with stronger client-side development capabilities (JavaScript, HTML, CSS).
I think there is a difference between the two!
A web application developer where I work may know very little about front end design. This is especially true if you work on a business intranet, where as long as something gets the job done - it's good to go! Web App Devs focus more on business logic and meeting minimum data requirements. If the data appears, it doesn't matter how it looks or what someone had to do to get it there. Hence, I wish where I am at now would raise the bar and allow me to focus on....
Web Developers are typically perceived to know more about front-end coding, using HTML, CSS, jQuery, Flash, and the like. I think they tend to focus more on usability, ease-of-use, efficiency, and similar things
These opinions are wrote from my experiences within a large company with a small developer team. My co-workers care less about how something looks (we are all technically web app devs), so I, the 'web developer', put the usability aspects in place and polish before we release stuff. Yeah - the management could improve this flow, but it works as it is.
A Web Developer is Tim Berners Lee for example. ;-)
Q: What's the difference between a website and a web application?
A: About a million rows.