Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Evolution of World Wide Web, Part 2, Theory and the Next Stage

I have uploaded the second part of the article---Evolution of World Wide Web on April 27. In this article we start with the discussion of several exciting web evolution laws. Then we apply these laws to predict the next stage on web evolution, which may be called the Web 3.0.

This article is still in progressing. Please leave your comments after you read it. I will update this post and the article regularly.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Yihong,

At last you finished your next article!!!! Great work! I'm suspicious that you've done one of the most comprehensive web research.

Now about article.
1. You wrote that the invention of AJAX is a fundamental upgrade. But there is one disadvantage with it: the data cannot be pushed to client by a server. it must be polled from server. This cause a lot of bandwith consuming and thus, unefficient. The techology that can solve this problem called Comet. It's a some kind of AJAX extension to provide server-push mesages. So client receive information just in time it changes. There is some work on this problem like and a commercial solution .

2.About ACtS and Linden Labs. I think that Second Life is a Web in 3-5 years. It cool for many things like entertainment, education and business, but for now it not so useful for other things. Besides, Linden Labs has opened sources of SL client and soon they'll open server's sources. Then we'll see.

3. I can't see the role of web app and their APIs in your model. How about that?

Sorry for short comment, Yihong, I had a hard workout today. Would you please post your answer here and on my blog?

Yihong Ding said...

Hi Vlad,

Thank you for your comments. Here are some brief answers to the questions you have addressed.

1. AJAX is a fundamental upgrade. It does not mean that AJAX is flawless. In fact, no single technology is flawless. As you have pointed out, AJAX has its problems on bandwidth consuming. And indeed, it has several other problems as well. But it does not hurt its contribution. Because of AJAX, Web-2.0 quality resources become useful and prevalence on the web. This is why we name it as a fundamental upgrade.

Thank you for pointing out the Comet. I will take a careful look at it. Based on your description, the purpose of Comet is to fix the existing problems of AJAX and thus accerlerate the spread of Web-2.0 applications. This kind of inventions exactly demonstrates that we are now in the middle of the Web 2.0 stage, the main task of which is to rapidly accumulate Web-2.0 quality resources.

2. Yes, I also have noticed some reports about Linden Lab and its plan of open source SL clients. This is a great movement according to our vision of web evolution. Now the lack of action to the Linden Lab is to design a model of "education client." Since you have read my article, you must know that this "education client" is not for humans to be educated, but for machines to be educated. Though I have this vision that this type of "education client" will appear, I don't know how it may be looked like since I am not good at game design. But this is certainly the Linden Lab should go for if it wants to be not only a company of computer games.

3. In this model, web applications and their APIs are services in varied complexity. You must have know the current trend of SaaS (Software as a service). Applications turn to be services. This is a certain direction that can be well explained in this web evolution theory.

In fact, currently we still have the difference between applications and services only because the majority of us still think that we are the residents on the web. Therefore, applications are for us (human), and services are for web spaces (machine). But the prevalence of SaaS has represented a trend that we want to shift our load as much as possible to machines. This trend also means that the current distinction between web applications and web services will be less and less significant, and may eventually disappear.

Thank you for you comments and look for more discussions with you.

Yihong