Question

I have 2 questions:
First, what’s the difference between a web application and a cloud application? Are there any differences at all? If I’m developing a web application (a site with many interactive features), can I call it a cloud application?
Second, if there’s a difference between a cloud and web application, what languages can cloud applications be developed in? Would a scripting language like PHP be useful for that?

Thanks.

UPDATE: I have watched the video in one of the answers, but I am still a little confused. Taking Google Docs as a example, all I see is a user interface that can be created with html and JS, along with a server script, and the data is stored in a database, which is basically the same thing a web application does. Or is it different?
Thanks

Answer 1

Web applications can run on “the cloud”. The cloud is basically a collection of dynamic computational resources (cpu, ram, storage etc) that can be used by web applications.

This allows apps running on the cloud to scale well because they are allocated resources dynamically.

You can use public clouds such as Amazon’s EC2 – or build your own private clouds.

A web app running on a cloud isn’t exactly a “cloud app” – but the app is simply hosted on a cloud.

I find the first half of this video explains it very well (if a little annoying).

Also see this quesiton which has some good answers.