Musings on Web 2.0
Web 2.0 – undoubtedly, is one of the most debated software buzzwords in the recent times. [The other term, in my opinion, which has attracted a lot of debate (and abuse) in the recent history is SOA]. To many, it is just about embracing new techniques, which are DHTML and JavaScript centric. But excavating the early manuscripts of Web 2.0 (like Tim O’Reilly's canonical Web 2.0 article) reveals a bigger picture.
So, what exactly is Web 2.0? Here’s another very brief perspective to add to thousand others already existing in different flavors. I would start by putting it this way (the world’s smallest definition of Web 2.0): A set of new ideologies combined with a set of novel techniques for building today’s web applications. Another definition could simply be – a new ecosystem of applications (or say “services”) built on the WWW platform.
The new ideologies:
1) The Web Platform
Websites today are not just places where static information is presented, or which offer a single service (like e-mail, storage, forums etc). Websites today are platforms in their own right. They offer the capability to “compose” disparate applications to build a very powerful whole. The word “Mash-Up” is a popular term used to represent this ideology of mixing (or re-mixing) data and functionality. Now, part of this realization is capable by seeing our large world of applications as services, which can be consumed in non-proprietary ways. Not just SOAP, but plain old JavaScript itself is turning out to be that duct-tape technology making this possible. Live, Google and PageFlakes are great examples of the same.
2) De-centralization of the Authority & Data
Websites of the past era basically owned the content and its presentation entirely. With Web 2.0, the authority on the source of the data and its presentation shifts to the user. The website or web application basically provides a canvas which the user leverages to consume (and compose) services from disparate sources to meet their needs. As an example, you could cite msn.com (of the yester years) giving way to Live.com of today.
3) Collaboration
This is new trend to surface in recent past. Websites today are opening the doors to the world to participate, contribute and collaborate. In this model, users directly contribute to the data/knowledge base of the website. The exemplar of this ideology is “Wiki”s, and Wikipedia, which is one of the most popular websites today. Tim O’Reilly’s article rightly calls this “Harnessing Collective Intelligence”.
The Novel Techniques:
HTTP, DHTML, JavaScript haven’t changed much in the recent times. But these days, you get to here a lot of new jargons popping all over the place, all of these based of these fundamental technologies. At the lead of this jargon parade is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Some others in this list are Comet, JSON, etc. An extensive examination of these would reveal that these are nothing but simple tweaks and hacks to existing methodologies like XMLHTTP and JavaScript’s own eval function. Therefore, I term these seemingly “new technologies” as novel techniques.
New or otherwise, these techniques and ideologies definitely have resulted in new possibilities and opportunities for web application developers. We are seeing new revenue models which transcend the notion of simple buying and selling which we saw in the recent past. A new journey has just begun, it is time for us to get on the bus and be a part a long adventure!