Web Technologies:Enter the Next

Continued from page: 1

Friday, August 10, 2007

p>Mash-ups
These are value added services in the form of lightweight tools provided by third parties to be integrated into a Web application. Mostly, mash-ups source the content from a third party via a public interface or API. For example, the small box on your personal homepage showing you the local weather forecast and another box showing you news headlines, are forms of mash-up.

 A mash-up application would generally comprise of three different participants, namely, API/content provider, mash-up site and client's browser interface. The API/content providers are the facilitators of content being mashed (sourced). They provide the content for retrieval by making it available through APIs, which generally are in the form of Web protocols such as REST, Web services, or RSS/Atom feeds.

There are some sites that do not provide facility for content retrieval, for that there are mash-up techniques to extract content from such sites. 'Screen scraping' is a process by which a tool attempts to extract information from the content provider by attempting to parse the provider's web-pages and formatting the retrieved content as XML data that is sent back as a response to an HTTP request. On other hand, a mash-up site is one where mash-up logic resides. The mash-ups can be implemented similarly to traditional Web applications using server-side dynamic content generation technologies, like Java servlets, PHP, or ASP. Finally, mash-up application is rendered on client's browser interface and where actual user interaction takes place.

Interestingly, these mash-ups have opened new avenues for enterprises, as it renders interoperability. For instance, an SAP ERP communicating with a Java application or a PHP website and presenting a unified result to the user. Mash-ups can also be used to source contents from disparate Web services and so, it makes sense to implement mash-ups into an enterprise intranet. This will provide enterprises with a common platform, from which contents of different applications can be accessed. As portal would be using a Web browser, there would not be a need to install client-environments for different applications, and thus would provide employees the flexibility to work from different locations. They just need being on the Net and should be having a Web browser to interface.

Web feed
It is a data format, which is generally used to facilitate users with the content that is frequently updated. Content distributors syndicate a Web feed and require users to subscribe to it. The entire collection of Web feed is aggregated at one spot with the use of Internet aggregators. An aggregator is a client-software or Web based service that aggregates syndicated Web content like blogs, news headlines etc, at a single location.

The functionality of Web feed is, as simple as, dragging a link from the Web browser to the aggregator. The content provider publishes a feed-link on its website and the end users subscribe to it, via an aggregator that is hosted on their machine. Aggregator enquires about any new content uploaded on the server and then either makes note of the new content or downloads it to the client's browser.

Web feeds are designed to be machine-readable rather than being human-readable, hence they can be used to automatically transfer information from one website to another without human intervention. The two main Web feed formats are RSS and Atom.

RSS: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML based protocol, which when used with feeds and aggregators, offers website summaries and syndications. The RSS feeds take the form of a single XML file that can be hosted and updated automatically by the website owners and accessed and read by RSS feed software. The RSS feed is an XML based document that has a global container RSS tag of format 2.0. This XML file has tags that define the main website, and provides set of item-tags representing links that have been published/updated on the site. Each such item-tag consists of a title, short description of the items and the links to the full text in XML format. The RSS feed reader software downloads this XML file and parses it to form HTML data that gets displayed on the user's browser in the form of hyperlinks, pointing to the original website.

Atom: There are two standards related to Atom-the Atom Syndication Formats is an XML language and the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating Web resource. The development of Atom was a result of incompatible version of RSS syndication and poor interoperability. Even though the functionality of RSS and Atom are some what similar, the intention with Atom is to make development of application easier with Web syndication feeds.

RSS may either contain plain text or escaped HTML as a payload, and there is no way to indicate which of the two is provided. In contrast to this, Atom uses an explicitly labeled payload container. Hence, more variety of payload types, like plain text, escaped HTML, XHTML, XML, Base64-encoded binary, is available in Atom and at the same time reference to third party content, like documents, video and audio streams can also be made available. Another point of difference between Atom and RSS is that Atom includes XML schema, whereas RSS does not.

Web feeds are useful for any enterprise, if they plan to integrate it in their portal solution. It can be used for showing corporate data as well, such as the latest software build status, network uptime, upcoming corporate meetings or other dashboard-like features.

Road to Enterprise 2.0
Collaboration and resource sharing have been two such headways shown by Web 2.0 that have envisioned enterprises to try benefiting from them. Blogging and Wiki are two collaboration techniques that enterprises can look forward to integrate into their portal solutions. Adding a blog to enterprise's portal will add a human interactive touch to a vendor-customer or management-employee relationship. Similarly, a central information repository can be created with the help of Wiki.

As we have talked of Web feeds and mash-ups, they can be efficiently used in an enterprise. Through Web feeds, employees can keep themselves abreast with latest information of data stored in corporate applications. On other hand mash-ups provide rich user interfaces that address the need for increased worker productivity, by making it easier for the user to find and use the information that he needs for a particular task or role.

Many SaaS (Software as a Service) model based applications are now being developed, to be used as Web applications. Presently, enterprises are already using SaaS applications in the areas of CRM, HR, accounting and e-mails, which can be accessed over the network and require just a stub application to be installed for usage. Now as these applications can be made available over Internet and just requiring a Web browser for execution on client machines, there is no need to install any service application on individual machines. Such applications when used by an enterprise for their portal will enable the employees to access applications remotely via the Internet.

Another Web 2.0 feature is of tag based searches, whereby user-defined tags are associated to the content. The search results are generated on such tags. Such tagging tool can be incorporated into enterprise portals for employees to define tags for their content to be put on the corporate data repository. So that later other employees can view those files, based on the tags and they could again add appropriate tags to such files for refining the search.

This new approach will open up new business avenues for the enterprises as this will help them increase the opportunity for productive interactions between employees, customers and partners, which is critical for the growth of any enterprise.

Web 3.0....Is it the future?
While we are talking extensively on technologies behind Web 2.0 and how an enterprise can benefit from it, there are already talks of a newer Web version-Web 3.0, also referred to as, Semantic Web. The vision is to make computers capable of understanding information and perform tedious task such as finding, sharing, combining information on the Web.

With Web 3.0, web-content won't be restricted to formats understandable to humans only, but it will move beyond that to a form wherein software agents can read, understand and hence use them, allowing machines to find, share and integrate information more conveniently and on their own. It's a drive from Tim Berner Lee's vision to make Web the universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

Some key technologies which will eventually make Web 3.0 possible would be RDF (Resource Description Framework), a simple language for expressing data models which eventually refers to objects and their relationship. OWL (Web Ontology Language) is another technology which will form the background for Web 3.0. It adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes as well as describes relationship between classes, characteristic of properties etc.

XML will obviously be there along with the above mentioned technologies and together they will form the backbone for Web 3.0. It's still some time before we see it coming in a big way. But, it surely is spelling a threat to the ruling desktop applications. It's only a matter of time. Till then, let's wait and watch!

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