Sharepoint Application Development And Emerging Opportunities

By Author: Nadeem Jafar
Total Articles: 21
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SharePoint application development ventures are keen to know how SharePoint 2013 will affect their endeavors. Microsoft is quickly moving to the cloud and this means that their architecture is now shifting towards software as a service model. The objective seems to create a model where businesses will pay a monthly subscription fee for their users to access a SharePoint instance, owned and operated by Microsoft. The idea is not a bad one considering the infrastructure, support, maintenance and upgrades that come with SharePoint.

Bad Codes Can Bring Servers Down

However, there is one potential problem that could crop up with a hosted model. There is no denying the fact that SharePoint can be more useful to a business if it is customized to meet their specific needs. While SharePoint’s functionality is certainly useful, out of the box, the problem is that most organizations prefer custom SharePoint application development to make full use of the platform. This can be a problem in a hosted model because custom code runs in a shared environment and not all custom code is good code. A bad ...
... code can jeopardize the working of the server and put the whole system out of gear for multiple customers using that server.

Microsoft has addressed this problem by creating an extensibility point in SharePoint 2013. This allows customers the option of building their own solutions for SharePoint application development, without affecting the functioning of the hosted model in situations where a customer’s code is not good enough to execute the functions. The SharePoint App model is a solution that addressed the problem effectively, simply because it has no SharePoint server side code that is executed by the SharePoint server.

Beating the Problem with SharePoint App

A SharePoint App is a solution is essentially a solution that can include HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Silverlight XAP files, images and other static files. However, it is not possible to include an assembly with custom code because that application would need to be executed on the server. The moot point here is: How is it possible to build something useful without server side code in SharePoint?
There are currently, three SharePoint App deployment models:

• SharePoint hosted

• Self-Hosted

• Automatically Provisioned Azure Web Application

A SharePoint hosted app is a SharePoint application development model made exclusively of static files that reside directly in your instance of SharePoint. When you add an application to one of the sites, the App deploys the files in your App to a singular App domain. When a user accesses your App, they are simply redirected to a page that lives in the App domain. They can use your App from this page. It effectively means there is no server side code allowed in this model.

A Self-Hosted App is an application where the files exist on an external server. The user is this case is redirected to a page on this external server where the App resides.



Automatically Provisioned Azure App is designed to be deployed to Azure. This means it will be hosted outside of SharePoint and cannot run any custom code.

Nadeem Jafar is well known author associated with Eastern Software Systems India. He is writing article on his experience about SharePoint Application Development and related SharePoint Portal Development services. To know more SharePoint Application then please explore: www.essindia.com