‘The goal? To help us more easily develop the next generation of Web applications that are every bit as good as or better than desktop PC applications.’
Dion Hinchcliffe, blog post, 11th Sept. 2006.
One of the key drivers of the development of Web 2.0 is the emergence of a new generation of Web-related technologies and standards. This has been underpinned by the powerful, though not particularly new, idea of the Web as platform . Whereas in the past, software applications ran on the user’s machine, handled by a desktop operating system such as MacOS, Windows or Linux, under the Web as platform, umbrella software services are run within the actual window of the browser, communicating with the network and remote servers.
One consequence of the Web as platform is that there is less emphasis on the software (as a package: licensed and distributed) and far more on an application providing a service. The corollary of this is that there is much less emphasis on the release of software and, indeed, many well known Web 2.0 services remain in a kind of ‘perpetual beta’.
So why has the idea of the Web as platform become more feasible now? The answer is that browser technology has moved on to a new stage in its development with the introduction of what are known as Rich Internet Applications (RIA) . Currently the main technology for delivering RIAs is Ajax, but there are some alternatives which are mainly based on Flash technology.
N.B Tim O’Reilly’s conceptualisation of Web technology with respect to Web 2.0 has since moved on to the idea of the network as platform. This is especially important for another one of his key ideas: software above the level of a single device. O’Reilly cites iTunes and TiVo as exemplars of this approach as, although not Web applications themselves, they leverage it as part of their infrastructure.
In this series, i will be talking more on some of the technology that run most of the web applications you might be using now such as Facebook, Netaviva etc.
Dion Hinchcliffe, blog post, 11th Sept. 2006.
One of the key drivers of the development of Web 2.0 is the emergence of a new generation of Web-related technologies and standards. This has been underpinned by the powerful, though not particularly new, idea of the Web as platform . Whereas in the past, software applications ran on the user’s machine, handled by a desktop operating system such as MacOS, Windows or Linux, under the Web as platform, umbrella software services are run within the actual window of the browser, communicating with the network and remote servers.
One consequence of the Web as platform is that there is less emphasis on the software (as a package: licensed and distributed) and far more on an application providing a service. The corollary of this is that there is much less emphasis on the release of software and, indeed, many well known Web 2.0 services remain in a kind of ‘perpetual beta’.
So why has the idea of the Web as platform become more feasible now? The answer is that browser technology has moved on to a new stage in its development with the introduction of what are known as Rich Internet Applications (RIA) . Currently the main technology for delivering RIAs is Ajax, but there are some alternatives which are mainly based on Flash technology.
N.B Tim O’Reilly’s conceptualisation of Web technology with respect to Web 2.0 has since moved on to the idea of the network as platform. This is especially important for another one of his key ideas: software above the level of a single device. O’Reilly cites iTunes and TiVo as exemplars of this approach as, although not Web applications themselves, they leverage it as part of their infrastructure.
In this series, i will be talking more on some of the technology that run most of the web applications you might be using now such as Facebook, Netaviva etc.
Tags:
Web 2.0, Internet Applications
