Besides trends, new technologies enable Web 2.0 applications. These technologies are used and combined to create new services.
RSS - RSS turns web blogs from a re-active technology into a pro-active technology. RSS is an automatic notifyer for web blogs. It provides an end user with a notification that a new posting has been added to a blog they are interested in. This turns blogs and newsgroups from posting repositories into a form of interactive communication.
- Podcasts - a delivery mechanism to store audio/video on a portable player. Organizations can produce and provide audio and video (info-tainment) broadcasts that can be downloaded and played on their portable player (“iPod”).
- The latest generation of scripting and programming languages like AJAX, Perl, Python, Java - now have more built-in routines that allow computer-to-computer communication. This speeds up development of more distributed applications that collect information or farm out computing to other servers.
- XML - infrastructure that allows pre programmed definitions to be passed between web pages. This is probably the most over marketed and misunderstood technology on the web. It seems like any vendor that is having a problem providing an advanced application will say they support this functionality via XML. In reality XML is to the web what Roman characters are to writing English. The invention of Roman characters provided an easy infrastructure to communicate via writing. Roman characters alone do not provide communication. What you need on top of Roman characters is an agreement on language e.g. Spanish, French, English, or Italian. Likewise for XML, the ability to pass XML strings does not provide you with any services unless a specified data format has been agreed on. One of the most successful XML data formats is Rosettastone, a data format used by manufacturers. A note to anyone purchasing a system where the vendor touts XML. Ask the next questions - what data format are you using? If the vendor says they are using their own data format you will know they used the term XML to make a proprietary solution sound open. The “X” in “XML” stands for “eXtensible”. This means that one of the main features of the language is that it can be extended. Unless all parties using the particular document understand the details of vendor provided extensions to the language, the communication will fail.
