http://www.iiszone.ziffdavis.com/article/Web+20+Off+the+PC/197323_1.aspx Web 2.0 Off the PC DATE: 22-DEC-2006 By IIS Zone Features Staff Web 2.0 can be a slippery subject. Not everyone agrees on exactly what it means, leaving the term open to gratuitous marketing use. But it does mean something, and that something is related to the richness of Web applications that make data more accessible and useful. One way to look at it, as a practical matter, is that it makes Web applications more like dedicated local computer applications, rather than having to deal with data the way Web applications traditionally did so, with poor user interactivity and frequent round-trips for data operations. Now with the cutting-edge of application development on the mobile device, developers and service providers are dealing with some tough questions, such as how well Web 2.0-style applications work on mobile devices. Some have been arguing that simple apping of the PC style of Web 2.0 to mobile handsets is doomed to failure, and there is much to support that argument. One of the hallmarks of these newer, richer apps is that they push data liberally out to the client (generally in XML formats) in order for the client to be able to display more to the user and allow rich editing techniques. On a handset, the memory and bandwidth this entails are expensive, both in their scarcity relative to a PC and in the battery life they consume. Latency is another problem that may affect mobile applications in a more profound way than on a PC, which typically has a much faster and cheaper connection. Building up and tearing down connections is a frequent operation in PC-based Web apps, even in Web 2.0. But in a mobile environment, it can cause large bottlenecks since the connection overhead is much greater. And of course these last two problems work at cross-purposes to each other. The solution to the latency issue is usually in more aggressive and intelligent pre-caching of data, which aggravates the memory and bandwidth problem. The solutions are found in good engineering of trade-offs and in advances, both in the handsets and the networks. These trade-offs also put a burden on the back-end applications which, in order to deal with different types of devices and connections optimally, need to grade the quality of data and perhaps even the number of features in apps in order to keep the user experience pleasant and the application affordable. One approach that is used by many apps is the following. Rather than use the standard browser interfaces, create custom-client applications that manage the data more effectively, perhaps with custom compression. But custom-client apps are an approach well worth avoiding if possible. Users and administrators are leery of having to manage multiple client applications, and of the potential for security problems they present. The added burden to developers in having to create a custom app or perhaps several versions of a custom app for different types of devices also won't sit well with developers. There's no way around the mobile handset being a harder environment to write for, especially for the data-rich applications of Web 2.0. But developers will still flock to it because of the advantages it presents, such as the ability to use GPS data from the device. And the more the user relies on the application, on or off the PC, the more valuable the application is. In the end, it's likely that the technological advances in the power of handsets, power management, bandwidth, and the intelligence of networks will make these problems obsolete, just as they largely obsoleted the need for PC application developers to do their own memory and device management. And even in the interim, as we build these networks and applications into what we expect in the long term, they are gaining wild popularity. Nothing speaks better to their value. On 2/15/07 4:15 PM, "elw@stderr.org" <elw@stderr.org> wrote:
Uh, this will sound naive, but is Web 2.0 actually using larger system implentations Internet2 (IPv6) or is it traveling on the same IPv4 platform as the WWW today?
IPv4.
I don't know of any non-experimental hosts that are reachable by IPv6.
If someone anecdotally knows of a 'biggie' that is routing/advertising IPv6 services, I'd love to hear about it.
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