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How Web 2.0 Functions

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The term “Web 2.0” is closely associated with Tim O’Reilly. It is a method associated with web applications. Web 2.0 facilitates designing interactive systems for information sharing, interoperability and collaboration on the WWW (World Wide Web). Social-networking sites, forums, blogs, video-sharing sites, wikis and RSS are examples of Web 2.0 These sites allow its users to intermingle with other users of the sites and even may change the contents of websites.
Though the term “Web 2.0” indicate a latest new version of the WWW (World Wide Web) but in fact this term does not refer to updating of any technical specifications. It only cumulative changes in the ways end-users and software developers use the net.

The phrase Web 2.0 is not a scientific term:

The term “Web 2.0” firstly used Mr. Tim O’ Reilly in his article “What Is Web 2.0”. This article was published on 30 September 2005 in the journal Computerra. In this article, Tim O’Reilly, related the emergence of a huge number of sites, combined by several broad principles, with the common trend of emergence of the Cyber community, and named it the Web 2.0 phenomenon. The meaning of this term is much debatable. But some scholars, who accept the existence of Web 2.0, allot some fundamental aspects of this phenomenon.

Following technologies are used in the development of Web 2.0:

  • Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax)
  • Adobe Flash
  • Adobe Flex framework
  • JavaScript/Ajax frameworks like Yahoo! UI Library, MooTools, Dojo Toolkit and jQuery.

For uploading and downloading new data from the web server without undergoing a full page reload, Ajax programming uses JavaScript.

Communications like data requests going to the server are separated from data returning to the page (asynchronously) in order to allow the user to keep on interacting with the page. If it is not done, the user would have to consistently wait for the data to come back before they can work on that website page (just as a page reload). This method of communication improves the performance of the website as well.

Another technology often used in Web 2.0 applications is Adobe Flex. Web 2.0 also uses technologies like PHP, Ruby, ColdFusion, Perl, Python, ASP on the server side.