Terms selection — 1
All the following definitions are obtained from Wikipedia website, so I am not going to list them in double spacing. However, in some of the terms, I add my comments on why I think they are important to understand for the provided articles.
1.) An Application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications.
Comment: As the first principle of Web 2.0 — The Web as Platform, it is important to know that most of the big players, such as Google, in Web are providing API for the developers to build their own website.
2.) The Document Object Model (DOM) is a platform- and language-independent standard object model for representing HTML or XML documents as well as an Application Programming Interface (API) for querying, traversing and manipulating such documents.
Comment: same as API
3.) Mashup
In web development, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool. The term Mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original goal of the data owners.
Content used in mashups is typically obtained from a third party source through a public interface or API (web services). Other methods of obtaining content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom), and screen scraping. Many people are experimenting with mashups using Amazon, eBay, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, Pictometry, Yahoo and YouTube APIs, which has led to the creation of mashup editors. Some programming languages, such as Orc, offer support for the creation of mashups.
Comment: This is the term that people used to call the program or software that built with web services. Therefore, it is definitely a buzz word for explaining web 2.0.
4.) Rich Internet applications (RIAs) are web applications that have some of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of proprietary web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines. Examples of RIA frameworks include Adobe Flash, Java/JavaFX and Microsoft Silverlight.
As web standards (such as Ajax and HTML 5) have developed and web browsers’ compliance has improved there is less need for such extensions. HTML 5 delivers a full-fledged application platform; “a level playing field where video, sound, images, animations, and full interactivity with your computer are all standardized”
Comment: As one of the principles of Web 2.0 is Rich User Experience, this is the goals for the web application developers.
5.) AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax has led to an increase in interactive animation on web pages. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object or through the use of Remote Scripting in browsers that do not support it. Despite the name, the use of JavaScript and XML is not actually required, nor do the requests need to be asynchronous. The acronym AJAX has thus changed to the term Ajax, which does not represent these specific technologies.
Comment: This is one of the key technologies for today’s web application developers.
6.) Search Oriented Architecture (SOA)
The use of search engine technology as the main integration component in an information system. In a search-oriented architecture the data tier may be replaced or placed behind another tier which contains a search engine and search engine index which is queried in-place of the database management system. Queries from the business tier are made in the search engine query language instead of SQL. The search engine itself crawls the relational database management system in addition to other traditional data sources such as web pages or traditional file systems and consolidates the results when queried.
The benefit of adding a search layer to the architecture stack is rapid response time large dynamic datasets made possible by search indexing technology such as an inverted index.
7.) Social Web
The Social Web is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web. Such people are brought together through a variety of shared interests. There are different ways in which people want to socialize on the Web today. The first kind of socializing is typified by “people focus” websites such as Bebo, Facebook, and Myspace. Such sites promote the person as focus of social interaction. To do this a profile is constructed by each user. In many ways the profile is similar to a passport.
The second kind of socializing is typified by a sort of “hobby focus” websites. For example, if one is interested in photography and wants to share this with like-minded people, then there are photography websites such as Flickr, Kodak Gallery and Photobucket.
The Social Web may also be used to refer to two different, yet related concepts. The first is as a description of web 2.0 technologies that are focused on social interaction and community before anything else. The second is a proposal for a future network similar to the World Wide Web.
Comment: This is the key player for Web 2.0, as all these big social web sites utilize all the Web 2.0 tools. It is important to take a closer look of all these sites
8.) RSS
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, mobile device or any computerized Internet-connected device. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's URI (often referred to informally as a "URL", although technically, those two terms are not exactly synonymous) into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.
9.) Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is an XML-based language used for the transformation of XML documents into other XML or "human-readable" documents. The original document is not changed; rather, a new document is created based on the content of an existing one. The new document may be serialized (output) by the processor in standard XML syntax or in another format, such as HTML or plain text. XSLT is most often used to convert data between different XML schemas or to convert XML data into HTML or XHTML documents for web pages, creating a dynamic web page, or into an intermediate XML format that can be converted to PDF documents
10.) Web 2.0
The term "Web 2.0" describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.
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