Application Development vs Software Development

noobman

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 15, 2005
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What's the difference between the two?

I've seen both terms thrown around in job descriptions (though software development pops up a lot more). Are they interchangeable, or do they have different meanings?
 
It depends on who's doing the reading or writing.

I'd expect "application development" to mean developing applications that go in front of users; that is, people who aren't very computer literate, and just using the computer to get some job done. Excel is a commercial application; most companies have internal applications to help process data or track customers and so on.

I'd expect "software development" to mean software development for code that doesn't necessarily go in front of users, or goes in front of users who are in turn other programmers or technical users. Network utilities, server-side code, middleware, programming tools, and so on.
 
They are the same thing but different people might regard them slightly differently, for example what mikeblas suggested could be the view of some people, but it's not a standard differentiation.
 
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