Web 2.0

I've been taking a look at the wonderful apps surfacing from Demo 08, and I can only say I'm impressed.  I'm not even sure it's really Web 2.0 anymore, as perhaps we're really starting to get into the Web+ realm.  I mean, in my mind, Web 2.0 was really limited to all the cool things people suddenly realised you could do with browsers, using technology that was old but suddenly had a cool new name - AJAX. 

All the apps appearing now seem to be RIAs - Rich Internet Applications.  And while you could probably build a RIA using AJAX, and do a pretty good job of it, the REALLY cool boys use AIR or Silverlight.

If you're not familiar with these, both technologies provide a cross browser / cross platform runtime - that enables rich applications to run inside the browser.  The cool thing about these runtimes are that they abstract the differences between browser implementations, so that we finally truly have a write once, run everywhere world.  Remember that - Sun promised that with Java back in '97....

So, what makes these new kids so cool?

Well - for a start - we're talking rich media - video and vector graphics in a very lightweight runtime.  Performance tends to be excellent.  On the Silverlight side, developers have access to a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation (a fairly large subset), but without the overhead of the massive .Net runtime.  This makes it an extremely compelling environment to create business applications in.  Not only do you have a very rich presentation mechanism without the overhead of coding to a large number of different browsers - you can deploy these apps to any OS (Apple, Microsoft or Linux) without any additional work!

Sounds too good to be true?  It might, and there are obviously some details I'm not mentioning here.  However, to whet your appetites, you should have a look at:

Buzzword - a truly cool word processor,

Blist - an online database that's excellent, and 

JournalSample - an demo of some Silverlight abilities

Both platforms are new, but already there's a large number of developers following each camp.  As users, we get to benefit as the applications created with these tools will surely enrich the Web.

So, is this Web2.0, or is it Web+ ?

I think - as we haven't had another crash yet, we should probably stick to Web 2.0 :)

Over the next few weeks I'll focus on these in a bit more detail.  Specifically, Microsoft is gearing up to the next release of Silverlight, which will be announced at Mix'08 in early March.

Keep watching.