WEB 2.0 - Tools that make the collaborative web work

Awareness in the free and open community

Why should open source users and developers keep an eye on Web 2.0? Most directly, Web 2.0 cranks up the demands on open source software. Development challenges on the LAMP stack are higher than ever before, as Web 2.0 sites require flexibility for payloads ranging from frequent and tiny AJAX requests to multi-megabyte video and audio streams. Lean, efficient and powerful server tools, including Lighttpd and Ruby on Rails are drawing away developers from the LAMP stack.

On the client side, free desktops that incorporate Web services and Web API clients will have a growing importance for users. And Web 2.0 sites push free browsers to handle more than HTML and a handful of image formats and fulfill their promise as desktop platform in their own right.

There are also lessons to be learned from the rise of Web 2.0. The scaling of Web communities to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users suggests that there is more that open source development teams can do to reach out to their users. Many FLOSS teams are increasingly using Web 2.0 tools -- blogs, wikis, social software, even video sharing and podcasting -- to close the gap between developer and user.

Technically, Web 2.0 sites have proven the viability of the browser as a platform for rich, non-trivial user interface. The AJAX techniques used by the most visible Web 2.0 sites are slowly finding a place in open source applications, sometimes based on JavaScript libraries such as Dojo and Mochikit; we can expect more in the year to come. On the server end, Web 2.0 has also given a push to HTTP-based remote APIs like Simple Object Access Protocol, XML-RPC, and techniques like REST.

Web 2.0 sites are also providing alternative business models for commercial open source development. Web services based on providing a Web interface to open source software, such as WordPad and Wikia, have been able to contribute to the FLOSS commons but continue to compete on the strength of their content, community, and "hard" resources, including hardware and bandwidth.

IT managers and other open source deployment specialists will need to think hard about Web 2.0's increased requirements for their networks. Richer media types may require expanded bandwidth capacity, as well as browser upgrades or changes on the desktop. Employees used to social software technologies (blogs, wikis, social networking) at home may come to expect their availability inside the firewall. That culture of openness may extend beyond organizational boundaries to customers, partners and even competitors. On the development front, internal applications may increasingly be built around HTTP-based API architectures, with AJAX as a user interface platform replacing custom desktop tools.

But the future of Web 2.0 is not uniformly rosy; there are still some important outstanding questions that make open source users uneasy. Many Web 2.0 sites depend heavily on closed data formats such as Macromedia Flash; some sites, such as Flickr, degrade gracefully to AJAX, and others, including MySpace And YouTube, don't, and are essentially inaccessible to free software users.