This is about Programming Web 2.0

Introduction

A profound change is happening on the cutting-edge of web development: we are relinquishing control of information. No longer are sites working independently from each other; no longer is information sitting in isolation with no interaction between sites. Rather, the best web programmers are now creating sites that allow information to be reused anywhere.

This means you can include the BBC’s latest news headlines on your site. It means people can keep track of your job vacancies on their desktop. It means instead of having a static map on your contact page you can include a map from Google that can be annotated, dragged around, and zoomed in and out. Ultimately, it means people will no longer need to get your information directly from your web site. That may sound terrifying to some but once you embrace this new paradigm its benefits become obvious. Welcome to the world of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 can be summarised thus:

• the web is a platform: just as software is released for Microsoft Windows so to will software be released for the web;
• data is the focus of everything;
• build an architecture of participation: that is, systems are designed for user contribution;
• sites are composed of features pulled from distributed and independent developers;
• it has lightweight business models; and
• continual, automatic — almost invisible — software updates rather than a software adoption cycle.

The technologies that allow this to happen already exist; the most important being XML-based syndication and aggregation using RSS and Atom, rich-application support (the web’s current beau in this field is AJAX), and using URLs as a command-line. The last of these will be the focus of a forth-coming paper; for the rest of this one the focus shall be on the first three.