Running WebMaker applications can be thought of as being in two parts. The visual client-side of WebMaker applications are typically web pages, with server-side controllers handling the page orchestration, remote service orchestration, database access, business logic, etc.
You can start your application composition from the client or server parts of WebMaker, but in almost all cases the two are linked by the underlying WSDL and Schema models that define much of the messaging that takes place between WebMaker applications, databases and remote web services.