Website Technical Solution
OVUONG.COM totally understands that a website is not an isolated item, it must be an useful communication platform of your marketing strategy. The website must generate the fastest , most direct and most effective connection between customer and company. That is the reason why OVUONG.COM proposes our partners the plan of building a 2.0 Web. Building a 2.0 Web may cost more than building the 1.0 Web, but the communication effects of 2.0 Web is much more remarkable.
What is Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 is a loosely defined intersection of web application features that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.
Characteristics
Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. By increasing what was already possible in “Web 1.0?, they provide the user with more user-interface, software and storage facilities, all through their browser. This has been called “Network as platform” computing. Users can provide the data that is on a Web 2.0 site and exercise some control over that data. These sites may have an “Architecture of participation” that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. Some scholars have made the case that cloud computing is a form of Web 2.0 because cloud computing is simply an implication of computing on the Internet.
Technology
The client-side/web browser technologies used in Web 2.0 development are Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), Adobe Flash and the Adobe Flex framework, and JavaScript/Ajax frameworks such as YUI Library, Dojo Toolkit, MooTools, jQuery and Prototype JavaScript Framework. Ajax programming uses JavaScript to upload and download new data from the web server without undergoing a full page reload.
To allow users to continue to interact with the page, communications such as data requests going to the server are separated from data coming back to the page (asynchronously). Otherwise, the user would have to routinely wait for the data to come back before they can do anything else on that page, just as a user has to wait for a page to complete the reload. This also increases overall performance of the site, as the sending of requests can complete quicker independent of blocking and queueing required to send data back to the client.
The data fetched by an Ajax request is typically formatted in XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, two widely used structured data formats. Since both of these formats are natively understood by JavaScript, a programmer can easily use them to transmit structured data in their web application. When this data is received via Ajax, the JavaScript program then uses the Document Object Model (DOM) to dynamically update the web page based on the new data, allowing for a rapid and interactive user experience. In short, using these techniques, Web designers can make their pages function like desktop applications. For example, Google Docs uses this technique to create a Web based word processor.
Adobe Flex is another technology often used in Web 2.0 applications. Compared to JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Flex makes it easier for programmers to populate large data grids, charts, and other heavy user interactions.[22] Applications programmed in Flex, are compiled and displayed as Flash within the browser. As a widely available plugin independent of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium, the governing body of web standards and protocols) standards, Flash is capable of doing many things that were not possible pre-HTML5, the language used to construct web pages. Of Flash’s many capabilities, the most commonly used in Web 2.0 is its ability to play audio and video files. This has allowed for the creation of Web 2.0 sites where video media is seamlessly integrated with standard HTML. HTML5 has also been proven to decrease the amount of computer resources required compared to Adobe’s Flash. Specifically, Apple Inc. has demonstrated the use of Flash on mobile devices decreases the battery’s lifespan significantly. Adobe has then announced that they will no longer publish future public versions of the mobile Flash plugin.
In addition to Flash and Ajax, JavaScript/Ajax frameworks have recently become a very popular means of creating Web 2.0 sites. At their core, these frameworks do not use technology any different from JavaScript, Ajax, and the DOM. What frameworks do is smooth over inconsistencies between web browsers and extend the functionality available to developers. Many of them also come with customizable, prefabricated ‘widgets’ that accomplish such common tasks as picking a date from a calendar, displaying a data chart, or making a tabbed panel.
On the server side, Web 2.0 uses many of the same technologies as Web 1.0. Languages such as PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, JSP, and ASP.NET are used by developers to output data dynamically using information from files and databases. What has begun to change in Web 2.0 is the way this data is formatted. In the early days of the Internet, there was little need for different websites to communicate with each other and share data. In the new “participatory web”, however, sharing data between sites has become an essential capability. To share its data with other sites, a website must be able to generate output in machine-readable formats such as XML (Atom, RSS, etc.) and JSON. When a site’s data is available in one of these formats, another website can use it to integrate a portion of that site’s functionality into itself, linking the two together. When this design pattern is implemented, it ultimately leads to data that is both easier to find and more thoroughly categorized, a hallmark of the philosophy behind the Web 2.0 movement.
In brief, Ajax is a key technology used to build Web 2.0 because it provides rich user experience and works with any browser whether it is Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or another popular browser. Then, a language with very good web services support should be used to build Web 2.0 applications. In addition, the language used should be iterative meaning that the addition and deployment of features can be easily and quickly achieved.
