If you are not familiar with the term Web 2.0, this introductory article lists some links as a quick jump-start. In the second part, we try to point out what this development means for enterprise software.

Tim O’Reilly was among the first to come up with the term. Web 2.0 represents a shift in who creates content, moving from a small group of programmers and content developers to nearly everyone that has a computer and Internet access. One of the effects is the increased focus on web user interfaces and the technologies that are being used to develop a better, improved user experience. These new technologies make the interface smooth and intuitive just like desktop software and hide distributed processing from the user.

This Wikipedia article explains the background of Web 2.0. Listed below is a collection of useful Web 2.0 links:

Overview of Web 2.0 Applications and Web Services

• Web 2.0 References as Icons: www.go2web20.net
• German Web 2.0 References: www.web2null.de

Applications

• Google applications: www.google.com/a/
• Google’s Online word processing application: online word processing application
• Web based mail client: mail.yahoo.com
• Online image manipulation application: demo.neximage.com

Blogging

• Blog tool and weblog platform: wordpress.org
• Blog search: technorati.com

Collaborative Work

• Project collaboration, management and tasks: www.basecamphq.com
• Get and stay organized: Keep your to-dos, notes, ideas and schedule online: backpackit.com
• Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare: www.writeboard.com
• Think together – collaborative online mind mapping tool: www.mindmeister.com
• A place to share and discover slideshows and presentations: www.slideshare.net
• Open source messaging, calendar platform: www.zimbra.com

Developing

• Public source code repository to store and organize code snippets: snipplr.com
• Sharing developer bookmarks: www.dzone.com

Social Networking

• Maintain your social network – focused on Europe: www.xing.com
• Maintain your social network – focused on US: www.linkedin.com
• Social bookmarking: del.icio.us
• Store, sort, search and share photos: www.flickr.com
• Flex application visualizing Flickr networks: www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph

Traveling / Maps

• Route planning, interactive maps: www.map24.com
• Regional restaurants, shops, business … meet people (German, English coming soon): www.qype.com
• Switzerland: weather, traffic, news, restaurants, culture, shopping: map.search.ch

Enterprise Web 2.0

What does this mean for enterprise software? Increasingly customers will expect business software to offer the same ease of use they are experiencing at other web sites.

For example, users that appreciate Flickr’s “edit in place” description fields will expect other web software to offer similar features.

Or, they will expect the collaborative benefits of tagging, commenting, as well as following changes by RSS feed in their business workflow applications.

See also this recent post by Gapingvoid on the convergence of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and social software:

The main story about social software is not about how it allows you to carry out existing company functions, just more quickly and easily. It’s bigger than that. In the future, companies will grow around social software, not the other way around.

The question is: What does your software need to meet this Web 2.0 culture and how can your business profit?

See also Hans-Dirk’s initial post.

When the majority of a company’s software engineers and consultants are primarily occupied with meeting the needs of its clients, opportunities for brainstorming and investigating new technologies as a team can become scarce. One option is to have staff permanently assigned to research. The problem with this approach is that research staff don’t get to experience first-hand the kind of real-world challenges facing commercial organizations. Another approach is to specifically allocate part of the yearly calendar, during which developers who are normally assigned to client projects, can get together and discuss and try out some of the ideas, which they’ve been bottling up inside their digitally oriented minds.

This is precisely what the annual Canoo Code Camp is designed for, and in May 2007 a group of Canoo’s developers again retreated to the Swiss mountains, carrying on their laptops outlines of some mini-projects, which they hoped to complete over an intense 3-4 day period.

One of the results of those mini-projects was the “Music Pinboard” application. As we state at the “Music Pinboard” download site, this application had a single intention: To investigate Sun’s new GUI scripting language JavaFX Script. Whilst the application may look fairly polished from the outside (a side effect of specifically seeking to create a “cool” look and feel), we need to stress that the app is prototypical in nature and as such was not subject to the rigors of a regular development. We actually think it likely that the application contains some bugs (although we hope not many) and we know for a fact that the application’s design is suboptimal in a number of respects. Here are some examples:

1. Music Pinboard’s footprint is around 5.4MB, which is undoubtedly excessive. Given that the core application (the JFX script, plus a handful of web-service abstractions) is around 100kb, where does the rest of this footprint come from? Primarily from three sources: (i) The JFX Runtime; (ii) The dedicated web-service APIs from Amazon, Flickr etc.; (iii) The JDIC browser component used to playback YouTube’s video. Add these up, and as long as you’re not using some additional compression technology, you end up with figure above.
2. Not being able to move the MP window around the screen would obviously be an unacceptable deficiency in a production application, but could be added in seconds given JFX’s declarative constructs. We’ve since asked ourselves why didn’t we think of this at the time
3. Although the user-response time is primarily dictated by the response times of the web-services (which, incidentally, vary significantly according to time of day/week), we could almost certainly improve the handling of these calls, as well as the rendering and caching of the corresponding results.

There are really two things to note about these points.

Firstly, some big improvements could certainly be made with little effort, and so it would be incorrect to assume these deficiencies are intrinsic to JFX. On the contrary, the ease with which these improvements could be made is to JFX’s credit.

Secondly, although from a technical perspective it is important to distinguish between deficiencies in the Java platform and deficiencies with JFX-alpha, whatever problems there are with Java that are not specifically addressed by JFX will, of course, be inherited by JFX (one could name having to download and install the JRE as an example).

Finally, these issues do nothing to diminish the success of the Music Pinboard mini-project, which provided us with insights that could not have been gleaned from reading about JFX alone, and which we will continue to share with the wider community.