Edward Ort's Blog

Web Builder 2.0 -- Initial Impressions of the Web 2.0/Ajax World

So here I am at the Web Builder 2.0 Conference at Caesars Palace Hotel in Las Vegas. John Crupi, a former Sun guy and now the CTO of JackBe, alluded to the interesting circumstance of doing a technical conference in Las Vegas by asking how many folks in the audience were already hung over. Only one guy admitted to that. Crupi said that he also talks at the TSS conference which is also held in Las Vegas -- usually on the third day. "By that time, pretty much everyone is hung over" he said.

This is not a heavily attended conference. Usually the opening keynote gives you a good idea of the total number of attendees. I guessed there were approximately 400-500 people in the room (which sat more than twice that much). I guess the way to look at this is that Web 2.0/Ajax is still in an emerging stage of development, so expecting a huge turnout is probably unrealistic.

So far I sat in on two sessions. The first was a keynote given by Scott Dietzen, President and CTO of Zimbra. The keynote was titled "Lessons Learned Building a 100+KLOC Ajax Application." The second was a developer session given by John Crupi titled "Ajax: Putting a Face on SOA."

The biggest impression I got at these sessions is that mashups are the really big deal (at least right now) in the Ajax/Web 2.0 world. Both Dietzen and Crupi punctuated their talks with some snazzy demos that seemlessly mashed up a variety of services into a front end interface. Dietzen's was an email application that enabled things like mousing over a sender's name to get further information about the sender, or previewing a URL in an email without having to download the page, or clicking on a plane's flight number in an email and getting flight tracking information.

Crupi's demo was a defense department/intelligence application that allowed users to bring in services to be mashed up on demand.

While Ditezen's theme was essentially how to enrich the user exerience with mashups. Crupi took more of an enterprise view of things. He noted that doing mashups is relatively easy to do "when you own the system." But it's not easy when you want to mashup a variety of services from different companies. He noted that companies want to maintain the sort of governance, security, and performance that they have for traditional apps. Accomplishing that is not easy in an Ajax app -- although his app demonstrated that it can be done (being a defense department app, it obviously had a lot of security protections built in).

Some other interesting (at least to me) tidbits that I picked up so far from these sessions, include:

• Companies are looking for frameworks to help them do Ajax apps, but they're demanding so many capabilities that no single framework (or even small set of frameworks) has emerged. Right now there are at least 40 Ajax frameworks in play.
• Most companies are getting into Ajax apps in a very simple way by just including an Ajax snippet such as Google suggest on a web page.
• Gartner claims that by 2010 at least 60% of new development projects will use Rich Internet Application technologies (like Ajax).

Comments

• Hi Ed,

  I could not agree more. Three weeks ago I released a simple picture of an system almost ready for release that might be of interest and got more hits from all over the world and DOD that was quite interesting. The interfaces shown were pre-beta but I just updated them tonight. Still a week away (I hope) from beta release but thought you and the readers might enjoy.

  The link is:
  http://www.myuniportal.com/myuniportal.jpg

  Shows what a almost 50 yr old can do with too many late hours over the years where I think the bonus room replaces the garage.

  Regards,
  Tony Anecito

  Posted by: tdanecito on December 08, 2006 at 11:17 PM

• Hi Ed,

  Beta version of myuniportal released with screenshots at:

  http://www.myuniportal.com/january_02.htm

  The combo screen shots illustrate mixing of different types of media not shown in pre-alpha release.

  Regards,
  Tony

  Posted by: tdanecito on January 09, 2007 at 07:49 AM

• Health 2.0 is derived from the term Web 2.0, which implies a 2nd generation/release of the Internet.

  The '2.0' part was established within computer programming - as a new edition of a an application is released, it is common practice for the programmers to add an incrementing number at the end of a program's name, to label the new version.
  Web 2.0 implies the '2nd release' of the Internet, which of course is not based on anything concrete. The Internet being made up of millions upon millions of interconnecting computers running lots of various programs, but is more of a concept to describe the type of programs/applications/functionality one can now locate on the Internet.

  The Internet was initially complied of mainly static pages of data. Soon to follow was email, web forums and chat rooms where discussions could take place. Web 2.0 refers to a trend on the Internet that saw a step forward in the way users conduct communicate over the Internet, which includes the use of blogs, videos, podcasts, wikis and online communities where people with common interests get together to share ideas, media, code and all types of information.

  Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, blogs, patient communities and online tools for search and self-care management look as though they will permanently alter the healthcare landscape indefinitely.

  As with Web 2.0, there is a lot of debate about the meaning of the term 'health 2.0'. The Wall Street Journal recently attempted to define Health 2.0 as:

  “The social-networking revolution is coming to health care, at the same time that new Internet technologies and software programs are making it easier than ever for consumers to find timely, personalized health information online. Patients who once connected mainly through email discussion groups and chat rooms are building more sophisticated virtual communities that enable them to share information about treatment and coping and build a personal network of friends. At the same time, traditional Web sites that once offered cumbersome pages of static data are developing blogs, podcasts, and customized search engines to deliver the most relevant and timely information on health topics.”

  While this traditional view of the definition imputes it as the merging of the Web 2.0 phenomenon within healthcare. I personally believe it’s so much more. In my opinion, Health 2.0 goes way beyond just the permeant social networking technology to include a complete renaissance in the way that Healthcare is actually delivered and conveyed.

  Source - http://rxpop.com/

  Posted by: rxpop on January 11, 2008 at 12:08 PM

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