Web 2.0 Technology and Standards

The advancement of the World Wide Web and increasing demand for online transaction based web sites from the customers have lead to evolution of new web based technologies like RIA(Rich Internet Applications) to help serve there customers better with much lesser response times then ever and browsing experience. RIAs do not require any software installation and they run on the client machine in a secured environment called Sandbox (Paul Anderson, 2007, p.27).
The Current technologies for delivering the RIA today are AJAX, Adobe Flash, ActiveX Controls. Additionally, Open APIs (Application Programming Interface) and RSS ( Really Simple Syndication) brought a revolution to the Web 2.0 based websites. Each of them have there own demands based on the business models. Let us discuss about them in detail.


AJAX
AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX is not a technology. It is more like a technique which uses other technologies. Ajax attempts to capture both an approach to working with the Web and the use of a specific range of technologies. This Technology helped in over of the biggest hurdle the HTML based web sites faced i.e. Spending more time for reload and refresh of the pages.
One of the main reasons for the success of AJAX is that it requests only the specific amount of data to and from the server which allows only a small portion of the web page to be reloaded dynamically once the initial page has been loaded. It gives the user a more “Desk Top Application Type” experience.
AJAX runs on an AJAX engine which is an intermediary sitting with in the client’s browser and assisting asynchronous communications with the server of smaller items of information. Before making any really necessary referrals back to the server, AJAX engine processes all the actions that require turnaround back to the server for a page reload,. AJAX success depends on the ability of the client browser to accurately and efficiently handle the JavaScript and XML.
HTML/XHTML, Cascaded Style Sheets (CSS), Document Object Model (DOM), XML, XSLT, XMLHttpRequest, JavaScript are some of the technologies used by AJAX depending on the requirements of the application. (Paul Anderson,2007,p.27)
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is software, when embedded in the browser creates an environment to the user by implementing animation and various Web components. They even allow to integrate videos into the Flash player. We can also build RIAs just using Flash.
Many advertisements over the Internet are created using Flash. The Flash files generally have .wsf format (no author, Wikipedia, Abobe Flash, Retrieved November 8, 2007).

Open APIs
An API provides the developer with a mechanism that provides functionality to a set of modules of the source code. When these APIs are made publicly available to access for free without requiring a license, then they are called open APIs (Paul Anderson, 2007, p.31). Open APIs allow Mash-up ( is explained in the next section) of services between Websites.
This really helps in creating rich experience to the user while using the Website(Paul Anderson, 2007, p.27).