P&P Summit Day Two: Architecting for Next Generation Web Applications

The keynote today was presented by Scott Isaacs, an architect for Microsoft.

He talked about Web 2.0 and how the future looks for web applications. He started with a history of the web and the evolution of technology that supported it, such as HTML, JavaScript, RSS, etc.

His point about what web 2.0 is that it’s a shift of focus of the web to experience and self-expression rather than just content. The introduction of blogs, sharing, tagging and sites focused on great user experiences are driving the need for better technology.    As more browsers gained the capability of richer functionality this opened up the possibility for AJAX and other new technologies to be more ubiquitous.

He is promoting the idea of Mash-ups for everything. Design your applications in a very componentized manner so that the experience can be modified and tailored for the specific user. This drives up the value of the application to the user. The ability to pull in disparate sets of content into a single customized experience is the driving force behind Web 2.0.

On Windows Live they use a “container pattern” that pulls down a very small page and then has the client compose the content of the page via pulling down and working with components. This is different than the traditional model of pulling down the entire page on each request. Both models have their uses. Actually, one of my old clients used the container pattern well before the term web 2.0 was coined. They had a JavaScript that pulled down the data it needed and constructed the visual form on the client rather than pulling the entire page from the server.

Scott talked about MicroFormats, or a way of giving a semantic or context to information in your content. This is done by using the class attribute to mean more than presentation, but also to add semantics. Check out http://www.microformats.org for more on this.

Continuing on the idea of MicroFormats he talked about using the clipboard to move content from one site to another and include the semantics of that content. He introduced the “Live Clipboard”. He showed an example where he went to eventful.com and copied a live clipboard link for an event and then pasted it into LiveWriter. When the pate occurred the entire formatted event was pasted including where, when etc.. On top of this he introduced the idea of SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions) for RSS. By adding some extensions to RSS a two-way RSS is created with some simple synchronization. Very cool.

At the end of his talk he spoke about the challenges of these technologies. They are all built on top of old technologies, such as HTML, RSS, etc. While the evolution of the technology has created a more simplistic solution than we would have done if we had started from scratch, they do come along with limitations and idiosyncrasies of the parent technology to deal with. You also have all the new challenges of the driving force is about user experience, so things like user privacy and secure data.

His ending remarks are about K.I.S.S, or in his terms, “Keep is Simple by being Smart”.

Overall it was a good talk.  Scott speaks very quickly, but he definately knows what he’s talking about.  Unlike some people who speak very quickly he didn’t stutter over his choice of words or descriptions.