Introduction to Web 2.0

This tutorial includes a short introduction of Web 2.0 followed by the detailed presentation of a simple yet complete Web 2.0 mashup application.

This application is “BuzzWatch”, the same sample application that I have developed for chapter 1 our book “Professional Web 2.0 Programming”. Server side, BuzzWatch is written in PHP 5 and it takes advantage of easy XML, SQLite and Cache_Lite. Client side, it makes extensive use the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library.

This is tech heavy session which follows, like we do in the book, each action, tracing HTTP exchanges, scanning the web server log and digging into the JavaScript and PHP code to introduce the main technologies and issues you find while developing Web 2.0 applications.

BuzzWatch comes in four different versions:

1. The first version exhibits the downsides of naive Web 2.0 applications: the pages have no URIs, the back button doesn’t work, ...
2. The second one fixes these issues at the price of code duplication between the client and the server
3. The third version eliminates this code redundancy
4. The fourth one makes BuzzWatch a good Web citizen with cool URIs

At the end of the tutorial, attendees have a good vision of how such applications work and of the main technical obstacles that they can encounter.