From HTTP/HTML to Web 2.0

The internet was revolutionary. It changed our lives as individuals. Companies changed strategies to adapt to this new channel. Let's look at how the technologies evolved since the 1990s.

Early Days
Netscape made the first widely available public web browser in late 1994, named Navigator. It started the internet revolution then. The worldwide network used for email and other electronic file exchanges served as the internet backbone. This universal connectivity was critical for the success of the internet.

The browsers and the world wide web servers exchange information through the HTTP protocol. HTTP was a stateless asynchronous communication channel. The transport was mostly over TCP/IP. The rendering was done in a very simple markup language, HTML. Besides rendering text and images, HTML was mostly about hyperlinks and forms. The beauty of HTML was the simplicity.

The Document Object Model (i.e. sandbox) of the popular browsers were also critical in the exponential growth of the internet. What you did from your browsers were totally safe, the code cannot do anything harmful to your computer or secretly retrieve information from your computer.

Mass adoption
In the mean time, consumers started to subscribe to dial-up connections via cable companies or AOL, hooking up directly to the internet for the first time from their home. Everyone had gradually caught on to the internet. Companies recognized that they can use the platform to launch new businesses and extend their existing business. Then it came the dot-com boom, and eventually dot-com crash. Amazon, Ebay and Yahoo are a few of the successful companies born during that period and still remain as dominant forces now.

Extensions like applets, ActiveX controls, Netscape Plug-ins, Netscape Communicator channels, Adobe Flash were introduced to achieve a richer and more user friendly environments. There were a lot of hypes that the browsers would took over the operating systems during the dot-com boom also. The main driver for these new technologies were to gain respective market share for their company. You can make your own judgment on how most of these non-standard technologies sustained over time.

Web 2.0
Nowadays, the internet is used mostly as an interactive and collaborative tool.. The request/response model and the simplistic HTML rendering that worked very well in the early days also showed signs of aging. AJAX, or Asynchronous Javascript And XML, is the buzzword now, with some credibility. It enables web pages to have more dynamic contents without the need of hitting "refresh" (i.e. think about type-ahead form suggestions and continuous updates to stock quotes). It also allows layers of information on top of each other (i.e. think about Google Maps). Mashup also seems to be gaining good momentum.

Tools also played a big role in the Web 2.0. On the server and content side, now we have so many frameworks to choose from. Aspect-Oriented Programming style of Spring framework combines inversion of controls and dependency injections. The details will be in another post. Microsoft has the ASP.NET and C# framework, mainly to help people in the Microsoft camps to do their work easier. Then there is the high level Rudy on Rails. Lastly don't forget the still popular Struts, servlets MVC frameworks. There are also a lot of web servers, database access and caching tools and technolgies to choose from also. There is no one size fits all in selecting the right technologies. Each company will need to access their unique requirement and their existing infrastructure and IT staffs' skill sets to determine the best technologies to use.

On the presentation side, sharing information are becoming bigger and better. New blogs, tweets, social networking sites are spawning up very quickly. With the availability of these user friendly sites, wider group of users can effectively share knowledge and information. This is certainly good use of technologies. I am very interested to see what we have in 5 or 10 years from now.