CDE Software: From the desk of Lance Rasmussen

You’re starting to see a lot of advertising campaigns use the buzzword “Web 2.0″.  Technologies are coming out that are “Web 2.0 compliant”.  Just what the heck is this “Web 2.0″ and was there ever a 1.0?  Do I have to upgrade my computer for it?

Web 2.0 is somthing that came about after the Dot-Com bust in 2001.  To one point, its used as a “cool term” for marketing.  In other cases, its used to earmark technology shifts from early generation web development to new generation development.

Using an example from Tim O’Reilly :

• Web 1.0 had Double-Click for advertising, which was primarily banner ads.  Web 2.0 is more like Google’s Adsense.
• Web 1.0 used download technology from Akamai. Web 2.0 uses BitTorrent.
• Web 1.0 referred a lot to Britannica Online.  Web 2.0 uses Wikipedia.
• Web 1.0 focused on everyone having personal websites.  Web 2.0 focuses on individuals having blogs (online “diaries”, such as what your reading here).
• Web 1.0 focused on advertising as being based on the number of pages viewd.  Web 2.0 focuses on the cost per click.
• Web 1.0 had Netscape as the major standard for search engines.  Google is Web 2.0’s answer.

Some of the technologies in browsers have changed.  One is using a term called AJAX.  In the past, when you were going to select an item, such as a car manufacturer, it would reload the page with the list of car models.  When selecting the car model, the page would refresh and show further specifics on the model.  With AJAX technology, you can cleanly (no pun intended) update the information without reloading the page.  The magic behind the scenes allows you as the customer see things seemlessly as if the page was custom programmed for you out of the box.

Some of these technologies require updated browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6 or 7 or Mozilla’s Firefox 1.5.   Depending on your operating system, you may or may not need to upgrade your operating system or computer to use these browsers. 

Web 2.0, however, shouldn’t be confused with Internet2, which will eventually speed things up much further on the Internet as well as change to IPv6 technology.  For those who have no idea what IPv6 is, the concept is simple.  Currently, networking and the Internet uses what is called an IP address.   Think of this as a personal phone number that instead of 206.555.5555 it is in the form of 255.255.255.255  Each group of numbers seperated by the decimal point can be 0 to 255.  Essentially each computer or network device is given a unique number either “permanently” or “temporary”.  There are various rules that dictate groups of these addresses that are set asside for private internal network use and some that are public, so that they can be found, such as a website, such as this. 

The problem now, is that with the boom of the Internet… we’re starting to run out of these “phone numbers”, to which there can be a maximum of about 4.3 billion.  There has been different technology improvements to help with this, but we’re getting close to having to make a change.  IPv6 is simply a change in how the phone number is.  Instead of only numbers, it also adds the letters A through F (this is called Hexadecimal, by the way).  Instead of decimal numbers, it uses a colon.  Instead of 4 groups, it has 8.  Instead of 4.3 billion as the max, you have about 340 billion billion billion billion combinations.   To put it in perspective, there are approximately 6.5 billion people alive today.

What would this look like in your web browser?  For the most part, browsers always use the pretty name to represent this “phone number”.   When you go to www.google.com, there is a lookup process (think of looking in a big big phone book off in never land) that says Google is currently at this phone number.  This process is called DNS lookup.  The whole idea is that people can easily remember names, versus phone numbers. 

If I knew what Google’s phone number was, I could go to my browser and go http://127.0.0.1  (this will go to your computer, but if it was Google’s number, it would go to it).    With Internet2 and IPv6, you would go to http://[2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344]/      Thankfully, though, we as simple folks who use the Internet, will never have to take memory pills to have to remember such a long thing because of DNS.

It’s quite amazing watching the Internet technologies continue to grow.  While my examples do leave out a lot of detail, I wanted to try and convey the jist of things.