All about the Web 2.0!

Okay, like a lot of people, I am getting very tired of hearing about “Web 2.0″ or “AJAX” it seems that every time you turn around, someone is exploiting these buzzwords. Yes, it’s very cool to bring standalone application features to websites or webapps, but what does it really mean?

Web 2.0 and AJAX are basically buzzwords for creating features in web based applications that flow, and work like standalone applications, without a full page refresh. For the most part the use of JavaScript and XML are used with the XmlHttpRequest object. What happens, is an event is triggered, usually by the user performing an action, or by a timed script action (window.setTimeout), which will use the XmlHttpRequest object to download a remote resource (usually XML), and use this to update/change content on the page. This is usually done without a significant impact to the user experience (UX).

The ability to do these things has been around for a long time now. There were similar methods available as far back as the mid-late 90’s. What makes it so special now, is how widespread the techniques have become. To top all this off, many web development frameworks now have integrated tools and components to perform many of these techniques transparently.

This entire post was started mainly because I came across a site today, that uses remote resources pretty well, and integrates them nicely. Weather Bonk is a site that combines Google maps with data from The Weather Channel and integrates them nicely, allong with a few web-cams of the area you are looking for.

I think the key here is not to go overboard with the AJAX interfaces, and keep an eye on usability, over just doing things for the sake of doing them. Checking if a username is available on a new user signup, without having to refresh the page is pretty nice. Having a web based application work like a stand-alone application, is also nice. Having, for instance, a travel site where you can’t bookmark the details page for a cruise, is not so nice. Hopefully some of you reading this will have found this insight useful, or at the very least found Weather Bonk to be pretty cool.

[tags]web 2.0, xhtml, xml, javascript, webservices[/tags]