As a follow up to the earlier post entitled AJAX: A Closer Look, i decided to dig deeper into this new technique and the trends in web design / programming that appear to be emerging. The term Web 2.0 is commonly used to refer to a new generation of web applications and systems.

From www.whatsweb20.com, “it’s going to enable a whole bunch of cool new things that we can’t even imagine yet”.

According to the Wikipedia:

A website could be said to be built using Web 2.0 technologies if it featured a number of the following techniques:

Technical:

• CSS and semantically valid XHTML markup
• Unobtrusive AJAX Techniques
• Syndication of data in RSS/ATOM
• Aggregation of RSS/ATOM data
• Clean and meaningful URLs
• Support posting to a weblog
• RESTian (preferred) or XML Webservice APIs
• Some social networking aspects (share your data with friends, etc)

General:

• The site should not act as a “walled garden” – it should be easy to get data in and out of the system.
• Users should own their own data on the site
• Purely web based – most successful web 2.0 sites can be used almost entirely through the browser

Other related technologies include:

• SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol
• Ruby on Rails

Here a some sites with excellent resources:

• script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, compatible and, ultimately, totally cool JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly, Web 2.0 style.
• Behaviour is the missing link for your ajax apps.
• Prototype is an object-oriented Javascript library that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.
• mir.aculo.us is a site with a collection of thoughts, links and other stuff related to web application development, RoR, AJAX, Web 2.0, and more.
• Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects.
• Techcrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing every newly launched web 2.0 business, product and service.
• Tool-man.org has some good resources, including some examples such as: Drag & Drop Sortable Lists with JavaScript and CSS
• JPSpan provides tools to “hook up” PHP and Javascript, for the purpose of fetching data from PHP into a web page which has already loaded, without reloading the entire page.
• SAJAX – Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod – XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP.
• CPAINT – Cross-Platform Asynchronous INterface Toolkit. It provides the code required to implement AJAX and JSRS on the back-end, while using JavaScript on the front-end.

Even more resources:
1. Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, portable, open, and free.
2. Snippets is a public code repository. You can easily add code to your personal collection of code snippets, categorize your code snippets with keywords (known as ‘tags’), and share your snippets via this site.
3. RubyForge is a home for open source Ruby projects.
4. Programming Ruby is a book complete with tutorials and reference for the Ruby programming language.