“Web 2.0″ and “Next-gen Web App”

May 27, 2007 on 3:53 am | In Web apps |

We have had mostly only PHP-related articles lately (even though this claims to be a web dev blog!), so for today let’s get away from that topic for a little bit and talk about something else.

You’ve surely heard of the term “Web 2.0″. However, not everybody seems to have the same definition for Web 2.0 — especially when it was just conceptualized. As time progresses, people have gotten more educated. Still, there seems to be many common misconceptions. Let’s look at them…

Web developers, especially front-end interface developers, often feel that any web applications/web sites that uses AJAX and DOM scripting would be considered Web 2.0. This was particularly true a year or two ago when the term Web 2.0 first became popular in the public. It has a lot to do with the fact that around that timeframe, Google came out with Google Maps and Gmail, both of which implemented a very interactive interface never seen before in other mapping and email services; and they were called Web 2.0. Yes, I was part of the group that fell for this — before I read more about it, I was convinced that Web 2.0 meant this.

Web site producers (for the lack of a better term; it means people in charge of creating web sites but not the ones doing the technical work) and businesses consider user-based web sites and community-focused networks to be Web 2.0. They consider the earliest instances of Web 2.0 companies to be sites like Amazon (among some others as well), where content is fed to you based on information gathered from others. Wikipedia (user-contributed content) and Friendster (all the social networking sites) are then also considered to be Web 2.0, even though at that time they did not have anything like an AJAX interface.

So why was Google Maps considered to be Web 2.0? From the surface, we see that the most revolutionary thing about Google Maps was the interface, as the interactive dragging and zooming were never seen before at that time. (MSN later on came out with Windows Live Local, soon to be followed by Yahoo Maps and MapQuest as well who also updated their interface to something similar.)

However, Google integrated their normal search to Google Maps, effectively creating a “mashup”. You can go to any area on the map, and run a search for any businesses, or even a generic search. Searching for “pizza” in San Francisco will yield results of where you can buy pizza. Searching for “Star Bucks” in the city can tell you all the store locations of Star Bucks. In addition to this, the Google Maps API let other users make custom applications based on Google Maps. Trulia is an excellent (and also one of the earliest) example of that.

Pulling information from various sources, creating a mashup and producing a useful application, define it as a Web 2.0 site.

Emil at friendlybit.com wrote a really good article about the definition of Web 2.0. It basically means that it takes a combination of these things to be considered Web 2.0.

So, “Next-gen Web App”?

What do I mean by “Next-gen Web App” now? In short, any web applications that make use of an AJAX and DOM scripting interface is a next-gen web app.

Not every web application can take advantage of information mashup and community-focusing. There are applications that are made possible with AJAX and DOM scripting but do not qualify as Web 2.0 because of the above definitions, and I feel that they deserve a special name (for now at least — before they become commonplace). It’s something that wasn’t possible before xmlHttpRequest and DOM scripting were invented, and it’s revolutionary.

With the power of these two things, software that could only be desktop applications in the past are suddenly possible to make as web applications. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a good example. DOM scripting provides a way for developers to do almost any kind of manipulation on elements on a web page displayed by a browser. AJAX provides a way to connect to the server for any processing work needed at any time, without interfering with the interface (with page reloads). Comet lets you do the opposite — allowing the server to talk to the client when an update is necessary. The entire Office suite is now possible as a web application.

The possibilities are endless because now, almost anything that could be done as a desktop application, can also be done as a web application. Meebo implements an IM software as a web app. Some companies are bringing internal applications to web apps. Now, installations, updates, and patches on mass machines are no longer necessary. Simply point your browser to an intranet page to run these apps, they will be the latest and greatest. And thanks to the speed of LAN, these apps run as smooth as if they were a desktop app.

As the average home user’s internet speed becomes faster and faster, any performance issues due to connection speed will be gone. W3C, along with browser makers like Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple, will be working together to create a stronger implementation of AJAX capabilities (something more robust and defined than relying on just xmlHttpRequest). In the near future, web apps can replace many traditional desktop apps. In my opinion, this is a huge leap in technology; and calling it the “Next-Gen Web App” isn’t too much of an overhype.

Web applications engineers are hot in the coming few years!