Updated October 2026 with an eighth principle on AI-written code, the 2025 OWASP Top 10, Google’s current speed targets, and a new FAQ. The expert quotes are from the original 2019 article.

Summary: Web application development has changed over the past few years. Some principles that applied in the past no longer make sense, while new ones have sprung up. In this article, we explore 8 principles that modern web developers should follow when building business applications. The eighth is new for 2026 and covers code written by AI tools.

What makes a “productive developer?”

The answer isn’t as obvious as it might seem. Generally speaking, productivity correlates directly with speed. With developers, however, it’s different. Speed doesn’t necessarily equal productivity.

For instance, suppose a developer completes a project in half the time expected. Is that developer productive? It depends. Does the application meet the specs? Is it usable? Is it secure? Will it scale up with the company? Will it adapt to future needs? I could go on.

As you see, the term “productive developer” isn’t clear cut. A “fast” developer who creates complex, unmaintainable applications isn’t productive. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’d argue that a productive developer is one who builds applications the right way, in the most efficient manner possible. In other words, productivity = speed + quality.

The next logical question: What makes a quality application? Is it one that delivers on the specifications? I believe it goes far beyond that. A quality application is built for both the present and the future. It adapts to changing technology, solves the user’s long-term needs, grows with the business, and is easy to maintain.

So, how can developers build quality applications? It starts with an understanding of modern web development principles. While this isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, here are 8 important principles of modern web application development:

Principle #1: It’s all about the user

Over the years, the web has evolved. Tools and methodologies have changed. New devices have emerged.

However, one development principle has stayed the same, and become even more important, throughout the years: It’s all about the user.

The problem is, this key principle is too often lost in the shuffle. Sometimes developers get wrapped up in the latest and greatest technology. Other times they’re forced to meet a tight deadline and have to rush through the project.

How can developers put the focus on the user? Before you start any development project, ask these two questions:

1. Who wants this?
It’s an obvious question that’s often overlooked. Who is asking for the web application? Is it a customer or prospect? Or, is it someone who believes that users need it? As explained below, the answer to this question can be the difference between a failed project and a successful one.

“Develop with the user in mind,” says Shayne Sherman, CEO of TechLoris. “This may seem obvious but this doesn’t just mean think about what they want. Figure it out. I’ve been with companies where we spent months developing something the marketing team wanted only to deliver it to the customers and find out they don’t want it at all. Always show prospective features to a subset of customers and get their opinions before you invest time and resources into the development.”

2. How will it be used?
Never lose sight of the main goal: Providing a great user experience. To provide a great experience, you must approach development from the user’s perspective. Ask questions like: Who is using it? What problems are they trying to solve? How will they use it?

“Developers and users think in different ways,” says Tigran Nazaryan, Machine Learning Team Lead at 10Web. “When building a web application, the customer’s requests are the priority, neither technology, nor the developer’s preferences. Thinking in terms of user stories helps a lot when defining tasks and to-dos. Who’s in need of this product? How will they use it? What expectations do users have? What would be the most intuitive UX and behavior of the app?”

Principle #2: Security is not a feature

The OWASP Top 10 is the standard awareness list of the most critical security risks to web applications. In the 2025 edition, broken access control sits at number one: Users reaching records or functions they were never supposed to see. Injection, which includes SQL injection and was a headline problem when this article first ran in 2019, is still on the list at number five. Insecure design has its own entry at number six.

Consider that for a moment. Most of these are widely known, preventable problems.

Why does this keep happening? While the reasons vary, one issue is that many developers still treat security like a feature they can add at the end. That’s not how modern web application security works. Security must be built into your web applications from the very start.

For a business application, that means deciding before the first screen is built:

• Who can open each application. Access by role, so a sales rep and a regional manager see different things.
• Which records each user can see and change. Row-level rules, so the rep sees their own accounts and nobody else’s.
• How users sign in. Through the directory you already run, such as Active Directory, SAML, or OAuth2, instead of another set of passwords.
• What gets logged. Who changed which record, and when.

“Security is too important to neglect till right before release or even after release,” says Nazaryan. “The design and architecture of the application should include all the security aspects according to the established requirements and standards. This way you’ll avoid any financial and reputational costs associated with vulnerability discoveries, exploits, data losses, or downtime because of your sites getting hacked.”

Principle #3: Tools are your friend

We’ve seen major growth in development tools. Developers have access to libraries, frameworks, and templates. They can use GitHub, IDEs, low-code development platforms, and now AI coding assistants. Tools like these have become a necessity for the modern developer.

Why?

We can boil it down to a couple of reasons:

Web application development is more complex
In the past, application development had more of a specialized focus. Programmers often focused on a single language for their development.

Now, that’s changed. The modern web developer is something of a “jack-of-all-trades.” They must understand programming languages, web vulnerabilities, API integration, responsive design, JavaScript, UX principles, modern architecture, and much more.

In other words, web application development keeps getting more complex, and it requires an ever-changing skill set. Tools let developers bridge this skills gap, helping them accomplish tasks they couldn’t do on their own.

Developers are under more pressure to move quickly
Developers are under more deadline pressure than ever. Businesses want their applications delivered quickly, without giving up function or security.

In many cases, these demands are impossible to meet with manual coding alone. As a result, more businesses are adopting development tools to speed up the process.

Principle #4: Applications have a need for speed

Users expect applications to respond right away, and that expectation keeps rising. At the same time, modern applications pull more data from more sources than ever before. If an application isn’t optimized, that extra data turns into slow screens, and slow screens drive users away, or back to their spreadsheets.

It also helps to have numbers to aim for. Google’s Core Web Vitals give three: The main content should load within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a click or tap in under 200 milliseconds (Interaction to Next Paint), and the layout should stay put while the page loads (a Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1). Google says good Core Web Vitals align with what its core ranking systems seek to reward. Internal business applications don’t get ranked, but the same three targets make a sensible performance budget for the screens your employees use all day.

What does this mean for developers? Plan performance work into the development process instead of saving it for after launch.

“Your websites must be blazing fast,” says Bryan Osima, CEO, Uvietech Software Solutions Inc. “This ties in with the mobile-first context, again. Mobile data access is not always the most reliable, and sometimes can be expensive. As such, any modern web developer must highly optimize their websites for speed and reduced data consumption.”

Principle #5: When it comes to architecture, think long-term

Much of the emphasis in development these days is on the user experience. As a developer, you must give users well-designed and easy-to-use applications, or risk getting ignored.

But don’t get so caught up in the interface that you forget the most important part of an application: The architecture. While application architecture might be invisible to the users, the impact that architecture has on your overall application is enormous.

For instance, architecture affects security, maintenance, flexibility, scalability, and more. Good architecture may take more time upfront, but it’s an essential part of building long-lasting applications.

How can you approach architecture from a long-term perspective? Here are a couple of ideas:

Stick with proven technology stacks
Developers love trying the latest and greatest framework or tool. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as they’re not using it for their next big project. While it may sound boring, stick with proven technology stacks when creating enterprise web applications.

“There are thousands of web frameworks and tools out there,” says Adham El Banhawy, React Developer at Best Response Media. “However, many are poorly documented or not maintained well (i.e. they receive little to no periodic updates). When starting a project, instead of going for what’s hot and new, go with what’s well documented and has an active community of contributors or even big companies (like Google, Facebook, Adobe, etc.) providing official support and updates.”

Build for growth
When planning your application architecture, look beyond the initial requirements. What happens if you need to add more features later? What happens if you need to switch to a different database or server? What happens if you need to support more users than you planned for?

“Think ahead about any possible growth of the application or the number of its users,” says Nazaryan. “Is the product ready for that? What if suddenly a traffic surge floods the site or what if users exceed their storage resources? What if the web app needs to be deployed on the second server located on the other side of the globe? Making architecture scalable greatly reduces ongoing maintenance and development costs and does not make the app or service slower nor hinder its growth because of technical limitations.”

Principle #6: Separate concerns within your applications

I remember back in the day when developers used a monolithic approach, building every feature directly into their application. The big problem with this approach: Maintenance. A change to one area might break other areas. Over time, the applications became unmanageable.

These days, modern architecture calls for a separation of concerns. For instance, we’re a big proponent of the n-tier architecture approach, which separates the application into layers. The advantage of this approach: It lets you maintain and enhance each application layer separately.

For instance, suppose you need to make your applications responsive for use on mobile devices. Or, suppose you want to update your application’s look and feel. N-tier architecture lets you replace the presentation layer without touching the other layers. This keeps your applications flexible and helps you adapt to changes as needed.

“People are fickle,” says Sherman. “Their tastes change and what’s considered modern on the internet changes just as fast. You don’t want to have to rewrite your entire application whenever tastes change. If you keep your display logic and your business logic separate, you can whip up a new interface to keep up with the times while the underlying logic stays the same.”

Principle #7: The only constant is change

Technology is always evolving. As developers know, this is both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, application development keeps advancing. New libraries, tools, techniques, and frameworks appear on a regular basis. These advancements lead to better application features and more efficient development.

On the other hand, new security vulnerabilities keep emerging. A previously secure application may now have a glaring security hole. It’s the developer’s responsibility to keep their applications up to date with the latest security standards.

In other words, modern web applications are never really “complete.” You can’t deploy an application and forget about it. Modern developers must keep updating their applications to adapt to changing trends and security standards.

“Web applications, in particular, are prone to external changes in the internet ecosystem affecting it, particularly evolving security standards,” says El Banhawy. “To ensure that your web application remains functional, secure, and competitive in the future, you must always try to improve it and adapt to external changes affecting your app quickly.”

Principle #8: Hold AI-written code to the same standards

This one wasn’t on the list in 2019. In Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, 84% of respondents said they use or plan to use AI tools in their development process, up from 76% the year before, and 51% of professional developers said they use them daily.

The same survey shows the catch. More developers said they distrust the accuracy of AI tools (46%) than trust it (33%). The most common frustration, cited by 66%, was “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite.”

“Almost right” is a real problem in a business application. A screen that works in the demo can still skip a permission check, hard-code a database password, or read from a copy of the data instead of the live tables. Those are the same mistakes the OWASP list warns about.

It’s also no longer just developers. A department head can build a working app with an AI tool over a weekend and show it to the CEO on Monday. That prototype is useful, because it shows exactly what the business wants. The risk comes when it stays in use without anyone in IT reviewing it.

So treat AI-written code the way you’d treat code from a new hire:

• Review it before it ships. Someone on your team reads it and understands it.
• Run it under your security model. The same roles, row-level rules, and sign-in as every other application.
• Point it at the real database the right way. Proper credentials and permissions, with no hard-coded passwords and no side copies of the data.
• Make sure someone can maintain it. If nobody on your team can change it in six months, it’s a liability.

One way to follow these rules every time is to have AI work inside a platform that already enforces them, so every application gets the same security, data access, and structure, whether a person or an AI tool wrote the first draft.

Where m-Power Fits

m-Power is mrc’s low-code development platform. It builds web applications over the databases you already run, such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Db2 on IBM i, and it follows several of the principles above by design:

• Security from the start. Applications run on your existing authentication (Active Directory, OAuth2, or SAML) with role-based access and row- and column-level permissions, and every action is logged. See how this works on a database front-end.
• A proven stack and separate layers. The build process generates standard Java source code with its SQL database access statements, compiles it into a Java servlet, and creates the HTML presentation files. You can open the code view and edit the HTML, CSS, or Java directly.
• AI under the same rules. m-Power‘s AI assistants query only the tables you give them, under the same security model as the rest of your applications. If you connect a third-party model, the data you allow into prompts goes to that provider, so you can choose a self-hosted model if everything needs to stay internal.

Your team can build the applications, or our consultants can build them with you. “I can now do five projects in the time that I would have done one project,” said Roisin Bowen, Systems Developer at Autochair.

You can click through finished applications on our live demos page. If you have a web application on your list this year, request a demo and we’ll build one over your own data while you watch.

Frequently asked questions

What are the principles of modern web application development?

The eight covered here are: Start with the user, build security in from the start, use tools to handle complexity, design for speed, plan the architecture for the long term, separate concerns into layers, keep updating the application after launch, and hold AI-written code to the same standards as any other code.

What is the most important principle of web application development?

Start with the user. Before building anything, find out who is asking for the application and how it will be used. An application that is fast, secure, and well built still fails if nobody needs it or it doesn’t fit how people work.

How do you build security into a web application?

Decide on security before the first screen is built. Control which roles can open each application, use row-level rules so each user sees only their own records, sign users in through your existing directory such as Active Directory, SAML, or OAuth2, and log who changed what. The 2025 OWASP Top 10 lists broken access control as the number one risk to web applications.

Should developers use AI coding tools for business applications?

They can, as long as the code gets the same review as any other code. In Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, 84% of respondents use or plan to use AI tools, but more distrust their accuracy (46%) than trust it (33%). Review AI-written code before it ships, run it under your security model, and make sure your team can maintain it.

What is separation of concerns in web development?

It means splitting an application into layers, such as the presentation, the business logic, and the data access, so each one can change without breaking the others. For example, you can give an application a new look or make it work on phones without rewriting the logic underneath.

Related Reading

• Database front-end software for any database
• How the m-Power build process works
• AI data analytics over your database
• What is a CRUD application, and how do you build one?