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From Web to Web 2

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2007-05-21 12:18:19 - Graham Ellis

"How do these technologies relate to Web 2?" asked one of my customers last week as we studied Apache httpd and Apache Tomcat. And of course that's followed up by the need to answer the question "What is Web 2".

Initial web sites - "Web 1" if you like - were discreet information sources provided by a web site owner, with connectivity to other resources made via the web site visitor's browser. In other words, each web site had:
* Information supplied by a single provider
* Isolated from other sites in terms of data provision
* Typically, a series of non-interactive pages.

Moving on to "Web 2", we have:
* Information supplied by multiple providers - blogs, forums, message boards, wikis, etc ("social software")
* Data provision across between sites - such as Google ads, RSS feeds and others
* Interactive and tailored pages to meet individual requirements.

The technologies are very much the established ones that are served by Apache httpd and Apache Tomcat anyway (and Web 2 means different things to different people!) so the answer to my initial questioner is really "You're already looking at Web 2". Well - you certainly are on our sites; not all of the web 2 technologies, of course; we have no incoming RSS feeds, Google Ads, SOAP or AJAX. But we do have social software, data provision from sites such as the European Central Bank, and interactive pages that will tailor the site to make it work better for what YOU require and for US to maintain.

Here are some old fashioned links: O'Reilly - the originators of the term "Web 2" and Wikipedia on Web 2. Oh - wait - even those aren't QUITE so old fashioned, are they? Wikipedia is very much Web 2 ;-)

Update - September 2008 - I have added a simple Ajax Example here, and Ajax is now covered on our PHP Techniques Workshop