Web 2.0 and MBUI

Coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999, she wrote:

 "The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in
  essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the
  Web to come."

The term is now closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because o
the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. According to
Tim O'Reilly:

 Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry
 caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an
 attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

Tim Berners-Lee described the term "Web 2.0" as a
piece of jargon" (2006-07-28) :

 "Nobody really knows what it means...If Web 2.0 for you is
  blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that
  was what the Web was supposed to be all along."

This involved a new generation of web applications which featured
rich interactive web sites, user provided content and social
networks, and the concept of "the long tail". Web pages as
applications with dynamic content driven by scripting. Suddenly
everyone was making use of features that had been lying dormant
since their introduction in earlier versions of Internet explorer,
namely, XMLHTTP and dynamic HTML. This new wave of applications
were inspired by the success of Google Maps and other google
applications that demonstrated the potential of making HTTP
requests from within web page scripts.

The variations across browsers in the details for how they handle
scripting and style sheets proved a huge burden for developers.
This encouraged the development and widespread adoption of scripting
libraries for a variety of purposes, e.g. GUI components, animations,
Ajax and JSON, and simple wysiwyg editing widgets.

Meanwhile, there is a lack of good interoperable web authoring tools.
Instead developer teams need to learn a variety of languages and
environments, e.g. HTML, CSS, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Perl, Python, ASP.NET,
JavaScript, Flash and so on. This has made it harder for people with
different roles in the developer team to communicate, e.g. business
logic, data models, graphics design, usability, and script hacking.
The is a lack of support for clean separation of concerns.

http://www.openajax.org

  "The OpenAjax Alliance is working to address interoperability
   issues among development environments for AJAX as well as to
   facilitate the creation of secure mashups."

IDE Working Group has responsibility for industry standards for
describing Visual and non-visual Controls and Ajax library APIs
for use in design-time and potentially run-time scenarios, see:

http://www.devsource.com/c/a/Architecture/AJAX-IDE-Interoperability-at-the-OpenAjax-Alliance/

The OpenAjax Hub is a set of standard JavaScript functionality
defined by the OpenAjax Alliance that addresses key interoperability
and security issues that arise when multiple Ajax libraries and/or 
components are used within the same web page.

http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/IDE_Charter_v2
http://www.openajax.org/member/wiki/OpenAjax_Metadata_Specification

The Open Ajax Alliance is working on making it easier to plug
JavaScript components together, both at run time and at authoring
time. This involves defining a framework for metadata for such
components, and in theory will allow JavaScript component libraries
to plug into a variety of different authoring tools. It would be
worth looking at this framework in the context of MBUI. What kinds
of controls are there? What customizable properties do they have?
What kinds of events to they respond to? What kinds of events do
they raise? In principle, these libraries can help authors with the
implementation of support for WAI/ARIA.

I should show some examples to the MBUI F2F.

Web 2.0 applications often involve mashups, where a web page makes
use of multiple services, e.g. combining Google Maps with real
estate data. Each service is defined in terms of an API built on
top of HTTP. These may be associated with client or server-side
scripting componets. In principle these could be described by
models and used within a model-based authoring tool. It would be
worth looking at some examples as they are likely to involve very
different kinds of components compared to the small set of
traditional GUI components normally considered in academic work.

I should find the documentation for Google Maps and Yahoo Pipes
to show the MBUI F2F.

  http://code.google.com/apis/maps/
  http://developer.yahoo.com/
  http://manual.widgets.yahoo.com/
  http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/