| September 2006 |
| Everyone's talking about Web 2.0, but what does it really mean, and does it offer promising career paths for developers? |
| By Don Willmott |
Web 2.0. It's the buzzword of the year, the subject of business magazine cover stories, the great hope for the ultimate revival of Silicon Valley. Its name even suggests a sort of second coming. But when we talk about Web 2.0, what, exactly, are we talking about?
Web veterans burned once before and now wary of marketing hype are taking a close look, trying to figure out if the services, sites, and products associated with this wave are the real deal and if the Web 2.0 movement is destined to deliver new and interesting challenges for experienced Web developers.
WHAT IT IS
First: a working definition. A Web 2.0 site or application is one that not only delivers compelling and specific services or content but also invites the participation of its users to add to, interact with, edit, share, and improvise on the features or the content. By involving users, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts, and new kinds of value are created. If you’ve ever used a Google map, you get the idea.
Another excellent example is Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!). We've all seen photo sites that invite us to dump our photos into albums, but it was Flickr that came up with the idea of letting its users categorize and share their photos publicly. The result: a fast-growing repository of searchable images that's useful to anyone, not just the people who have posted their photos. People share their Web bookmarks at del.icio.us, vote on the best news articles of the day at Digg.com, and comment on high-tech issues at Slashdot, one of the first sites with a Web 2.0 vibe. In every case, user participation enhances the value of the site. In fact, some analysts avoid the term “Web 2.0,” preferring to call it the "participatory Web."
THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE SIZZLE
One of the underlying common denominators of most Web 2.0 apps is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a loose collection of programming techniques that adds the user interactivity that makes Web 2.0 sites so compelling. With AJAX, much of the code is handled on the client end, allowing for much more interactive applications. As an evolutionary step up from JavaScript, it can be a challenge for developers more used to traditional JavaScript programming.
Can you handle it? The likely answer is yes. If you're fluent in HTML, XML, and CSS and have strong experience with JavaScript, you can probably conquer AJAX with some studying and practice. As Nathan Oostendorp, Front-End Architect for SourceForge.net Group, puts it, “Most of the programmers I know who use AJAX learn exclusively online, although not from a single particular source. But remember that ‘AJAX programming’ is really mostly ‘JavaScript programming.’”
John Clyman, a programming expert and a principal of Seattle-based Cascadia Labs, agrees and sees AJAX as part of a progression. Raw HTML is pretty easy. XML/XHTML requires slightly more discipline. Getting good with CSS requires some practice. JavaScript is a real programming language that you can do a lot with," he says. "Doing serious AJAX is probably closer to writing traditional Web apps where you need some real programming skill, but there are a bunch of pre-fab toolkits around that simplify the task." Clyman adds that "a really simple AJAX widget might take a day or less, but doing something amazing like Google Maps probably takes months of hard-core efforts.
When asked to come up with a list of qualifications for the type of programmer he’d want to work with on Web 2.0 development, SourceForge.net Group’s Oostendorp comes up with these four:
- Code Comprehension – Often projects have been hacked by many people for different reasons, and reading between the lines is important.
- A Modular Mindset – Being able to take a project from a basic application to a modular approach, as well as being able to take a module API and use it, means you can have hundreds of people contributing to your project instead of five to ten.
- XML Literacy – Most Web 2.0 applications have XML (or an equivalent data transport mechanism) as their backbone.
- DOM and JavaScript Savvy – A big part of Web 2.0 is viable due to the recent robustness of the Document Object Model and JavaScript. A Web 2.0 programmer has to know these concepts inside and out.
THE CAREER PATH
If you're interested in applying your programming skills to building the future of the Internet, you should have plenty of opportunities to do so. Today, sites and services that qualify as Web 2.0 abound, and more are coming on the scene every day. Internet marketing Guru Seth Godin, who is famous for his trendspotting, has counted a whopping 937 Web 2.0 sites which he tracks at www.alexaholic.com/sethgodin, everything from Adaptiveblue.com to Zvents.com. Ranking the list by traffic, his top five are MySpace.com, eBay, You Tube, Wikipedia, and Orkut. A look at the career pages at some of the top sites on Godin’s list will give you a great idea of just what you’ll need to make the cut at a high-profile Web 2.0 site.
Another fun way to experience the scope of Web 2.0 sites is web2logo.com (www.web2logo.com), a site that lets you search Web 2.0 companies by category and learn more about them while it simultaneously presents you with all their strangely similar logos.
Given the creative ideas behind so many successful Web 2.0 concepts, job applicants should be able to not only demonstrate traditional programming prowess but also a good measure of creativity, the talent to experiment, to mix components, to mash-up apps, and to show an understanding of the needs of users who now expect much more interactivity from the Web.
In the end, for all the hype around Web 2.0, perhaps it's nothing more than the next small step on the long evolutionary path that the Internet is taking. As PC Magazine's Editor Lance Ulanoff says, "Web development lives on a continuum of new ideas. We're in the logical phase for our time, and the next one is whatever should naturally follow." Ulanoff doesn't know for sure what that next one will be, but it seems inevitable that whatever it is, someone will try to call it Web 3.0.
Don Willmott is a New York City-based journalist who focuses on internet and technology trends.
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