INSiteBiz >> Services We Offer >> Application Development >> Web 2.0

Web 2.0

Short answer: Yes, we "do Web 2.0"

Long answer: Frankly, some at INSite tend to ridicule this term as jargon. However, as the term is now widely adopted and clients have even asked for "Web 2.0 technologies", we thought it best to interpret the term. Most users of the internet today are actively participating in the "Web 2.0" — anyone who rates a product on Amazon.com or posts on their blog or Facebook page is participating!

Five years is a long time in internet evolution, but the basic concept of Web 2.0 (and it really is a conceptual framework, not a set of technologies) has come to mean user empowerment through web-based technology platforms that allow anyone to become their own publishing/participation and collaboration center. Early on this social phenomena was facilitated through the use of blogs, with their ability to post information and allow others to participate through commenting on the information.

Web 2.0 concepts include:

The Web as Platform

This key principle states that the Web now functions as an operating system. What this means is that users do not need to rely on applications installed on their local desktop or distributed through a client-server. The application lives on the internet, in the 'cloud" and is delivered as a "service" to users. Desktop software-like functionalities are currently being delivered via the web as web-based applications.

Rich User Experience & User Participation

"Rich Internet Applications" was a term coined by Macromedia, the developers of the application Flash (Macromedia Corporation was purchased by Adobe systems in 2005). If you have ever worked with a Flash application embedded in a web-page you understand that the user experience was superior to that which the web offered at the time, as it could mimic the feel and responsiveness of a desktop application. Now, the use of Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and jQuery allows us to develop rich-client applications (RIAs) that are more intuitive, interactive and productive then older, traditional web applications.

User Participation

AJAX

In the 1990s, most web sites were based on complete HTML pages; each user action required that the page be re-loaded from the server (or a new page loaded). This process is inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappears then reappears, etc. Each time a page is reloaded due to a partial change, all of the content must be re-sent instead of only the changed information. This can place additional load on the server and use excessive bandwidth.
Asynchronous loading of content first became practical when Java applets were introduced in the first version of the Java language in 1995. These allow compiled client-side code to load data asynchronously from the web server after a web page is loaded. In 1996, Internet Explorer introduced the iframe element to HTML, which also enabled asynchronous loading. In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which was later adopted by Mozilla, Safari, Opera and other browsers as the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript object. Microsoft has adopted the native XMLHttpRequest model as of Internet Explorer 7, though the ActiveX version is still supported. The utility of background HTTP requests to the server and asynchronous web technologies remained fairly obscure until it started appearing in full scale online applications such as Outlook Web Access (2000) and Oddpost (2002), and later, Google made a wide deployment of Ajax with Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005).
The term Ajax was coined on February 18, 2005 by Jesse James Garrett in an article entitled "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications".