WEB 2.0

• Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It's about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts.

• Web 2.0 is a term popularized by O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International as the name for a series of web development conferences that started in October 2004.

• Oreille Net is the main organization which is dealing with standards for Web 2.0

• The figure above shows a "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O'Reilly Media. It's very much a work in progress, but shows the many ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core

• Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

• This is an attempt to clarify just what is meant by Web 2.0.( features available or differences in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 approach)– Web 1.0  Web 2.0– DoubleClick --> Google AdSense – Ofoto --> Flickr– Akamai --> BitTorrent– mp3.com --> Napster– Britannica Online --> Wikipedia– personal websites --> blogging– Evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB– domain name speculation --> search engine optimization– page views --> cost per click– screen scraping --> web services– Publishing --> participation– content management systems --> wikis– directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")– stickiness-->syndication

We can conclude from the above figure that

• Web 2.0 is not a specific software or some registered trademark of Microsoft or Google, but a buzzword describing a collection of approaches to using the net in new and very innovative ways.

• Web 2.0 is based on technologies like Ajax, a web development approach based on JavaScript and the XML programming language. This mix of technologies allows pages to function more like desktop-based applications rather than as old-fashioned static content pages as we have been used to find on the Web

• Web 2.0 refers to technologies that allow data to become independent of the person who produced it or the site it originated on. It deals with how information can be broken up into units that flow freely from one site to another, often in ways the producer did not foresee or intend.

• The Web 2.0 paradigm allows net users to pull information from a variety of sites simultaneously and deliver it on their own site to achieve new purposes.

• With Ajax-powered sites, users can interact with information inside individual pages as if they were using a software application, leaving the old web metaphor of a sequential navigation path among static web pages.

• Web 2.0 lets data act as its own entity, which can be changed, altered or remixed by anyone for any specific purpose. When data is an entity, the net moves from a collection of websites to a true web of sites that can interact and process information collectively

• But it is not a world of stealing others’ work or pirating information for one’s own gain. Instead, Web 2.0 is a product of the open-source, sharing notions the internet was founded on, and makes data more connected. This allows new information and business opportunities to be built upon the shoulders of the information that came before.

• Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

• The technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 is complex and evolving; it includes server software, content syndication, messaging protocols, standards-based browsers, and various client applications. These differing but complementary approaches provide Web 2.0 with information storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities that go beyond what was formerly expected of websites.

• One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. (a blog is just a personal home page in diary format )

• One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS("Really Simple Syndication" technology ).

• RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. Some call it the "live web". What's dynamic about the live web are not just the pages, but the links. A link to a web log is expected to point to a perennially changing page, with "permalinks" for any individual entry, and notification for each change. An RSS feed is thus a much stronger link than, say a bookmark or a link to a single page.

• With Web 2.0 RSS kicks in the turbo and becomes widely used to syndicate, filter and re-mix news, articles and other types of content into new information items. It is in fact in the remixing, in the skilled selection and juxtaposition of existing content and information that the greatest potential of the Web 2.0 paradigm truly lies.

• Web 2.0 thrives on another cool technology called RSS. As many of you already know, RSS allows users to get automatic updates when a site changes instead of checking it all the time to get the latest information. One simply subscribes to the site’s RSS feed, and as content changes the information is automatically delivered to your RSS reader or aggregator.

“The value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage, and to the

richness of the user experience and the amount of satisfaction it offers.”

• It is a new concept to use WEB for all content and applications. In essence Web will become a portal.

• One other feature of Web 2.0 that deserves mention is the fact that it's no longer limited to the PC platform.

•  To date, iTunes is the best exemplar of this principle. This application seamlessly reaches from the handheld device to a massive web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station.

• Tunes and TiVo also demonstrate many of the other core principles of Web 2.0. They are not web applications per se, but they leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure.

• This is one of the areas of Web 2.0 where we expect to see some of the greatest change, as more and more devices are connected to the new platform.

• Proponents of the Web 2.0 approach believe that Web usage is increasingly oriented toward interaction and rudimentary social networks, which can serve content that exploits network effects with or without creating a visual, interactive web page. In one view, Web 2.0 sites act more as points of presence, or user-dependent web portals, than as traditional websites. They have become so advanced new internet users cannot create these websites, they are only users of web services, done by specialist professional experts.

• What is now termed "Web 1.0" often consisted of static HTML pages that were updated rarely, if at all. They depended solely on HTML, which a new Internet user could learn fairly easily.

• It has since come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997).

• Overview of Web 2.0 techniques

• A website could be said to be built using Web 2.0 technologies if it features a number of the following techniques:

• Technical

• Unobtrusive Rich Internet Application techniques (such as Ajax) • CSS • Semantically valid XHTML markup and/or the use of Microformats • Advanced User Interface languages such as XUL and SVG • Flash Remoting • Syndication of data in RSS/Atom • Aggregation of RSS/Atom data • Clean and meaningful URLs • Weblog publishing • REST or XML Webservice APIs • Some social networking aspects

• General

• The site should not act as a "walled garden" - it should be easy to get data in and out of the system.

• Users usually own their data on the site and can modify at their convenience • Mainly web-based - most successful Web 2.0 applications can be used

almost entirely through a web browser: this is commonly referred to by the phrase "network as platform".

• Applicable to an emerging generation of game development, proposed as thin games

• Data returns should be dynamic, not static, changing depending on variables associated with the user's query (e.g. keywords, location).

• The first and most important evolution towards Web 2.0 involves the syndication of website content, using standardized protocols which permit end-users to make use of a site's data in another context, ranging from another website, to a browser plugin, or a separate desktop application.

Let us Consider one example from Web 1.0

• Akamai is a company which is specialized in content publishing, replication and web 2.0 technology.

• Let me give you one example of content functionality For example I have a website hosted in USA but there may be users from

different parts of world (say India, China) want to get to my site. If there are any images or download files serving from USA has to go thru whole internet delaying the website to open or server. Instead Akamai has servers over whole world and they replication this content to different parts of world. So if a user is opening a site from India, he or she will be recognized by the location and the content will be servers from his/her nearest location

Akamai's Edge Platform is the world's largest distributed computing network, consisting of more than 15,000 servers worldwide

This is one of their specialization, but they may have improvements and involvements in different upcoming (web 2.0) technologies.

Let us Consider one example from Web 2.0 (Bit Torrent)

• Here it is peer to peer sharing and downloading. It uses all the resources from all the systems involved in the network and using that software.

• Here every client is also a server; files are broken up into fragments that can be served from multiple locations, transparently harnessing the network of downloader's to provide both bandwidth and data to other users. The more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file.

• Bit Torrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it. While Akamai must add servers to improve service.

SummaryBy summarizing what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies are:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability • Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them • Trusting users as co-developers • Harnessing collective intelligence • Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service • Software above the level of a single device • Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Note: As we are involved in the development of Java/J2ee here is an article that explains about How to Improve J2EE Performance and Reliability

http://www.akamai.com/en/resources/pdf/press/Akamai_Article_Computerworld_J2EE_Perf.pdf

Some great examples of this Web 2.0 approach are available at : http://www.masternewmedia.org/web_2/web_2_examples/web2_examples_of_services_and_applications_20051006.htm

• References:-- 1) http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_2_for_designers/• 2) http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1

• "For corporate people, the Web is a platform for business. For marketers, the Web is a platform for communications. For journalists, the Web is a platform for new media. For geeks, the Web is a platform for software development. And so on."