List of Example Web Applications

Airlines

• www.delta.com. Delta Airlines. URLs indicate site is probably developed with Java Servlets and JSPs (Clues: .jsp and .do extension in the URLs.)
  • Brief story: User enters an origin, destination, day of departure, day of return. User is given a list of available flights and fares. (User can then make reservation and purchase a ticket, but describing that would required another much longer story.)

Books (retailers)

• www.bn.com, Barnes and Noble
  • Brief Story: User is interested in a book on some topic, by some author, or with some title. User can enter information about the book in a search box and click "search". A list of matching books is shown. The user can select a book from the list, and learn more about the book. If the user wants to purchase the book, the user can create do so [details would require another, longer story.]

Maps

• maps.google.com, Google Local. Provide maps, satellite photos, and hybrid maps for addresses. Provides direction finding. Example of AJAX technology.
  • Brief Story: User enters an address and clicks enter. User is shown a map of the requested location. User than can then click and drag to move the map. User can click to zoom in, or zoom out. User can select three different views of the map: a conventional map, a satellite image, or a hybrid map.

Performing Arts

• www.imdb.com, The Internet Movie Database. Allows searching for information on movies, actors, and other topics related to the film industry. According to the site's own description, it is based on Apache and mod_perl.
  • Brief Story: User can enter an actor, movie title, or director and find a list of matches. User can then either select an actor, and get a list of the movies that actor was in, or select a movie and get a list of the cast from that movie.

Tutorials

• http://www.zend.com/zend/tut/tutorial-yank.php: Build your own Database Driven Website using PHP & MySQL by Kevin Yank. Site itself uses PHP (not surprisingly) as evidenced by the .php extension.
  • Story: User can read a tutorial on PHP and MySQL, and see a list of links to reader comments about that tutorial (at the bottom) listed by topic and userid. User can click on any of those links and read the comments. User can also click on a link to add a comment; user is prompted for email address, name, subject and message text.

Weather

• www.wunderground.com, The Weather Underground. Latest version seems to be based at least in part on ASP, but there are probably many technologies under the hood.
  • Brief Story: User enters a zip code and gets a weather forecast for that zipcode. (There are lots more stories that could be written from this site: there are blogs, saving of favorites, automatic email of severe weather forecasts, etc.)

Note about the "brief stories" listed here

These "brief stories" are not intended to be complete descriptions of the functional capabilities of each of these sites. In fact, for most of these sites, a complete description of all the capabilities of the site in "story" form would go on for pages and pages. I've just given a "starting point" to give a general idea about the site, and give you an idea of "how to start" when developing stories for your own site.

The idea is also this: if you were to sit down and develop a "competing" site from scratch, where would you start? What basic functionality would you develop "first" to get a prototype up and running?

For example, with IMDB, my story lists only that you can search by actor, movie title. In fact, you can do dozens of other types of searches as well. For my brief story, though, I've limited the search types to actors and titles to keep the story short.