During the past months, I have seen a very interesting and highly discussed focus on the blog newsletter from ComputerWorld that I subscribe to. The focus is directed at what O'Reilly coined in 2003 as Web 2.0.
Bill Thompson at Reg Developer
have some interesting remarks we have to think of when we stear our way through the information highway, development wise.
Now we must decide whether to put our faith in Ajaxified snakeoil or to look beyond the interface to distributed systems, scalable solutions and a network architecture that will support the needs and aspirations of the next five billion users.
The issue about looking beyond the interface is not new, this idea has been well disputed in even my young development enviroment. Sadly, scalable solutions are not beeing prioritised over profitable and non-accessible solutions.
AJAX is hyped to be a block buster, but AJAX is nothing more than the things you've "always" had, just in a new wrapping. Furthermore:
Dan Farber at ZDNet blogs
is also quoting Bill Thompsons views, but adds his own views to complement,
...we cannot rely on Javascript and XML since they do not offer the stability, scalability or effective resource discovery that we need.
Does the WAP hype ring a bell for someone?
Ora Lassila at Wilbur-and-O
has something against Web 2.0, and I just had to comment him.
I am assuming that all this really started when the term "Web 2.0" was coined. It is a marketing term for something that does not exist and has not even been defined all that clearly. It is hype. It has little, if anything to do with technology. It represents misguided thinking. The Web evolves, yet using some numbering would suggest that we are talking about a major new version. Good for marketing, I guess. Makes people who don't have a clue go "oh, I have to get me some of that new Web 2.0".
Or, as a comedian once said, wake up and smell the bad espresso. Web 2.0 is a dressing, as you say, a marketing word. But not only for marketing. Isn't 2.0 something used to make the leighty understand it?