[javajosh]

I like the "he can make an application on his own" definition, but this masks the juicy part of this question, which is "well, what does that take?" Realize that, these days, you could build an arbitrarily complex program using nothing more than GitHub Pages with a dynamic shared data structure layered on and connected with some javascript, e.g. with Firebase. Personally, I'd consider that to be a kind of a stack.

But yeah, most people don't design software like that yet, so they mean server rendered pages, which means a server container of some sort, an application "middleware" process (something like node or PHP or Java), and a database process, all of which allow the user to, from one perspective, "pan and zoom" across some data corpus, and gives them the right to poke that data corpus at a few points.