Web Development vs Software Development?

Web development is the development of Web sites and applications that run on the Web (for example, databases that store forms and access the information) or Q&A sites like Fluther.

Software development is the developing of applications that run on computers, such as Word (A word processing program) or Excel (a spreadsheet).

Web development is all about user interface and the end user experience. It is done at a very high level.

Software development, OTOH, is done at a much lower level and is about implementing all of the layers of “stuff” between the end user experience and the actual bit banging that goes on in the processor.

Alongside what the top 2 have said, occupation wise it would require a Graphic Designer to create web pages, while on the other hand an Engineer to develop the software. (in the general sense and professional world that is) However the two can communicate code amongst each other according to my engineering buddy through XML coding

@YoBob there can be just as much low-level coding for web development as there is for software development, and just as much end-user design for software development. The biggest difference is that web development is designed to be run on a central server and pushed out to the thousands (millions) of users accessing the site at any given time. Software development (for consumer apps) is nearly always run on a single machine in a person’s home, has access to the resources (the files, hard disk, printers, memory, etc) on that machine.

As @auhsojsa mentioned, the two can communicate together (although it’s often via things other than XML), so if you have an iPhone app that accesses your Facebook account, then you have a software developer writing code to run on the local iPhone that’s communicating with Facebook’s server via web API’s to pull in information. There is a team of web developers at Facebook who engineer how those API’s work and how they communicate with Facebook’s own server code.

@gorillapaws – It is true that solid UI development is a part of software development, particularly if you are an applications developer. However, as an embedded software engineer I rather disagree that there is much low-level coding for a web developer. Sure, in addition to graphical design a web designer might have to write some code from time to time. But generally this is done in a high level language like Java. Below that high level code are a multitude of abstraction layers that sit between it and the actual hardware and it is in those layers where a large part of the task of the software engineer lies. Never have I heard of a web developer needing to concern himself with the value in gpr 3 or whether or not one needs to do a sync instruction after a write to make ensure that the caches on a multi-core device remain coherent, or the state of the call stack when returning from an ISR.

@YoBob I see what you’re saying, I guess I was considering things like optimizing the Google search engine as web development, which we would all agree is almost certainly very low level.

Web development is a kind of software development, meant for some web purpose (duh!).
As well noted web development can involve everything from user interface to database interaction to nuts and bolts hardware interface (rare for most web sites, but you can bet amazon or google’s got some custom bottom layer stuff tailored to their hardware).

-But you can say about just about every sort of software development.
Most of the time folks don’t mean the nuts and bolts because these days there is some lovely abstraction provided by the operating systems. But somebody codes the OS, and somebody codes the driver layers below them.

It’s easy and useful to take the OS and hardware abstraction for granted and most people mean user-interface plus dataflow when they talk about software development. The master computer scientist puts it succinctly : Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs Back then they didn’t have many spare cycles to spend on user-interface, and these days we call programs ‘applications’ or ‘apps’ so maybe now you’d phrase it “User-Interface + Algorithms + Data Structures = Apps”.

Dynamic web development is software development.

Web development is focused on web-based applications, while software development is focused in desktop applications, although web development can be categorized under software development