Is Web 2.0 Possible with Existing Open Source Technologies?

[kgun]

1. Background

This Is Web 2.0 Possible with Existing Open Source Technologies? recent article.

2. KW's

• AJAX - Asynchronous Web model
• Web 2.0
• RIA
• Social networking platforms
• Push technologies
• RPC

3. Some cites from the article.

"In fact, if you sift through those eight million Google hits, you'll find only a handful of open source technologies that address the problems associated with pushing content asynchronously to the user through standard browser mechanisms".

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"To deliver responses asynchronously, it's necessary to invert the HTTP protocol by holding an open request at the server, and fulfilling that request when an update is available".

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"While standards activities related to asynchronous communication in the servlet model progress in JSR 315, the industry has tackled the problem in disparate, non-standard ways. The lack of a standard mechanism is discouraging because any scalable push mechanism will need to be tightly integrated with the underlying server mechanism, requiring deployment-specific implementations. The good new is that a variety of solutions has emerged across open source applications servers, which we'll survey".

4. Comments.

To get meaningful comments, I hope that you read the article at least once.

[wige]

Honestly, I think the article is stretching the traditional definition of Web 2.0, by adding the component of near instantaneous updates to the mix. However, I don't quite see why it wouldn't be possible to achieve. In fact, this very page fulfills the basic requirement, which can be seen when you edit a post. As soon as you edit a post, you immediately see the changed page, delivered through AJAX. The difference between this page and the setup described in the article is that you do not see changes made by other users instantly. Although making this an instant process would be a complex issues, making it nearly instant should be less difficult.

First, I hate push technology. I have seen it used in the past, in older versions of the Windows OS. It can be tricky to get it to work on some network setups, and there is a potential for exploits - for example spoofing the originating IP address to push malicious content to a client. That said, it should be trivial to create a lightweight pull system that would keep a page updated on a short interval, say every 10 seconds.

Take this page as an example. Lets suppose that this page gets edited frequently, both by the addition of new posts, and by the editing of existing posts. Each post on the page has it's own ID, which is used for linking. To update the page for all visitors in near real time, each post would simply need to be contained in it's own div with an appropriate id. A javascript would then be run on a 10 second interval to download a dynamically generated text document. The parameters passed to the document would be the time of the last request (or the original request) and the ID code of the page. The text file that is returned would contain a comma separated list of post ids that have changed since the previous request. If the text file contains IDs, the script would then request each updated post and update the page. This would all happen pretty close to real time.

I have used similar methods on an internal search page, which modifies the contents of the results page in near-real time based on changes to a user-input field (instead of in response to a server side change) and this method would require very little change.

Of course, this method would cause a small increase in bandwidth consumption for the page, and there are only a few applications that I can think of that would benefit from such a technology (for example, news sites and web-based e-mail clients). Most of the web sites I have seen that are traditionally regarded as web 2.0, such as Wikis and social networks would not gain much benefit from the ability to almost-instantly update.

[kgun]

Ok, but does that answer the main question of the article?

Is Web 2.0 Possible with Existing Open Source Technologies?

I bolded what I regard as the most important word in the title.

IMO, it is or at least with new open source technologies ..

<cite>
"Internet-based chat is the most basic example of the near-instantaneous interaction that Web 2.0 demands, but even delivering these basic capabilities in a scalable, lightweight, browser-based mechanism is beyond the scope of most AJAX technologies".
</cite>

Example: phpFreeChat - Web2.0 AJAX free chat server - Latest news

[wige]

I think the basic technology to accomplish near-real time chat embedded in a web page would be possible to accomplish with three scripts, and would work with all major browsers using the AJAX capabilities of the Javascript installation included with the browsers. This would require no third party libraries at all, and could probably be created pretty quickly.