Background

I don’t remember the first time I heard the phrase Wen 2.0 however I remember when I first mustered the courage to ask somebody what Web 2.0 was. It was the fall of 2003, I was working for Disney Online and our executives just returned from a conference talking about Web 2.0. The response to my question was “Ajax”. I was puzzled so I then decided to seek harder for a definition. I found that it was indeed Ajax.

Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. learn more

Basically, Web 2.0 is data driven web based applications. What separates these applications from a simple web page is more than the user just staying on one page and bits of the page update instead of having to reload the whole thing. The main selling point of this technology is the ability to download and change only that what needs to change. The idea was to do a number of micro requests instead of one giant request that anticipates all possible choices that can be made. Needless to say a number of well placed micro requests require a lot less to be downloaded.

The first web based application to catch the eye of executives is Gmail. I remember when the Director of Application Technology at Disney Online asked me how the heck Gmail was able to do what it did. The funny thing about 2003, we did not know that we were using Web 2.0 for a couple of years. Learn More

What is Next

Web 3.0

A key fact to technology that is yet to be realized by the masses the the impact the World Wide Web Consortium (http://w3c.org) has had on application development. The W3C is a collection of key innovators in the industry that has given us one of the most revolutionary concepts known as Web Standards. Granted that Web Standards are not 100% fully accepted, they are at least 99% accepted, which is mind bogglingly huge. Web Standards are an agreed upon way browser rendering engines use HTML, CSS, Javascript, as well as other minor areas.

Almost by accident this concept has given a long needed unifying graphic user interface which allows for the same application to be used on Unix based systems such as Apples OSX, Internet Explorer on PC’s as well as FireFox on Linux, Windows, and OSX. The list goes on.

Web 2.0 gave us insight on how to arrange web based applications by the division between the logic of an application which would exist on a hosted service and the GUI (Graphic User Interface) that would exist on the client machine.

With this technology an applications could use a combination of a web browser such as FireFox or Internet Explorer and web services that would be hosted outside of the clients machine. I cannot stress enough how fundamentally big this is. Though it might not be transistors to microchips, but vacuum tubes to transistors. Though we no longer use transistors we would not be where we are today without them.

One of the most outstanding applications of this concept is Adobe’s Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). Adobe made the decision to not reinvent the wheel and build a browser rendering engine from the ground up. They figured that since they want to court web based application developers already familiar with HTML, Ajax, CSS, and Shortwave Flash it would be silly to code something to web standards when there were already available rendering engines.  Adobe decided to use Web Kit, which is the same rendering engine used in the Safari Browser. AIR also gives an API to allow for the user to interact with the operating system. Since there is no standard for communicating with the clients file system or system resources AIR for the Mac is coded different than that for Windows. Since the API used to communicate with the front end the burden for cross platform falls upon that of Adobe developers and not on the application developer.

Another high point of this technology is a lead in to Web 4.0. This is the interchangeability between a web based application and an AIR based application. The best example is Adobe’s Acrobat.com platform. There is a web based version as well as an AIR based version. The AIR based version is more convenient to use and requires less resources however, the functionality of the application is almost exactly the same. With Adobe’s Flex Builder a developer can build within the rules of a web based application while having the ability to integrate specific functionality specific to AIR such as communicating with the operating system such as loading a file into the application.

It is important to note that AIR is not the first of the new generation of web applications. Google, Yahoo, Mozilla, Apple, Windows, and a couple others all have been developing this idea.  It is also important to note that it is not the first time we have seen an integrated platform either. Java has been doing this when Internet Explorer 3 was struggling against Netscape. AIR is the best example of the exploitation of these concept.

What makes this better than existing web based applications?

We all go to those web sites in which we need to jump through several hoops before we can do what we want to do. A good example would be updating your “Tea” blog on Blogger.com.

First you need to open your browser, if you are like me and use a portal site as your home page, you get distracted by stock prices, sport scores, your email, current news, weird news, and a quick sudoku game.

Next you got to http://blogger.com. Since my wife and I share computers I cannot take advantage of the “remember me” feature thus, I need to log back in. Since my passwords are protected I need to give FireFox permission to pull down my log-in and password information.

The great idea I wanted to blog about is fading.

If you are one of those people that don’t delete old blogs and have spent the past few years finding the right blog for you are then faced with a clutter issue.

If you are one of those people that work on several blogs you are too faced with a clutter issue.

By the time that you open the browser, navigate away from the distractions, log in, find your blog, start a new post, the topic you wanted to blog about is nothing more than a reminder that you had a great idea.

The alternative would be to have an AIR application that is set to log you on automatically, and select a specific blog. This then gives you instance access to your Tea blog and there is only one click that stands between you and blogging about the new Russian Tea at the Tea Rose Garden.

to be continued

Next: web 3.5