Web 2.0

Overview

Web 2.0 refers to the new generation of web applications that facilitate information sharing and social networking. The term is commonly associated with sharing information, interoperability, and user-centered designs. The technology brought about the change in websites from static web pages to dynamic, interactive web pages. Web 2.0 tools enable online participation in content creation and social interaction.

Web 2.0 has become so widespread that companies are now using it as a marketing technique. Using Web 2.0, information can be taken from various places and personalized to meet the needs of a single user. The term has little to do with technology upgrades; rather, it describes a change in which we use and perceive the Internet.

Benefits

Web 2.0 has revolutionized the entire concept of online communication. Users can create a network of friends or change the content of a website. Web 2.0 allows more interaction among people who visit various websites. There are more opportunities to access information, share ideas, and reduce communication costs.

How It Works

Web 2.0 uses the web as an application platform to develop blogs, social networking sites, user-provided content sites, content syndication, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, social book marking, image sharing tools, and video sharing sites.

The client-side/web browser technologies typically used in Web 2.0 development are Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Adobe Flash, and JavaScript. Ajax programming uses JavaScript to upload and download new data from the web server. The data fetched by an Ajax request is typically formatted in XML or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. As a result, the user can easily transmit structured data through web applications. After the data is received, JavaScript uses the Document Object Model (DOM) to update the web page.

On the server side, Web 2.0 uses languages such as Hypertext Processor (PHP,) Ruby, Perl, Python, and Active Server Pages (ASP). Developers use these languages to dynamically output data using information from files and databases. To share its data with other sites, a web site must be able to generate output in machine-readable formats such as XML, RSS, and JSON. When a website's data is available in one of these formats, another website can use it to integrate a portion of that website's functionality into itself, linking the two together. In this way many websites can be linked together.