
Tim Berners-Lee began work on his World Wide Web project in 1989. He never had a slight idea, then, that the project he is working on would evolve into what we call Web 2.0 today.
Today, the Web is not at all what it was in 1993 – when browsers did not have support for images – a website contained only the text. Thankfully, those days are gone. That was I would say Web 0.0.
Then with the support for images and JavaScript, Web 0.0 evolved into Web 1.0, and then with the birth of AJAX, this still nascent Web 1.0 took the form of the magical nexus that we call Web 2.0. With Web 2.0, you can play games (online) in one tab, edit a Word Document (online using Google Docs) in another tab, book the Air tickets for your trip to Techfest in the next tab, conference through video in the next tab and this goes on. Almost everything, and even more than what could once be done on the desktop, is now possible in the browser. This has become possible because, unlike Web 1.0 which comprised Web pages, Web 2.0 comprises not web pages but Web Applications (MS Word is a Desktop Application and Google Docs is a Web Application, for example).
Web Applications are more sophisticated than Desktop Applications because everyone can be connected through the intermediary World Wide Web. (Two people can simultaneously edit the same Google Doc while discussing it online through Google chat, for example).
Now, what do you do to edit a Word Document? Well, you click on the MS Word shortcut on your desktop. Open the document. Edit the document. Save the document. Close MS Word. Ah, that was simple! How nice it would be if you could do the same with Google Docs (without opening the browser)? You do everything in a Desktop environment yet it accesses the central Google database where all your data is stored.
How about a search bar on your desktop from where you can perform a Google search (without opening the browser)? The photos of your birth day are stored online on Facebook and you wish to increase their brightness. You fire up Photoshop, open the image in Photoshop (without downloading it from facebook), edit it, and when you are satisfied with the result, save the photograph and it gets saved automatically on Facebook (no need to upload the edited photo). Search your friend in a search bar on your desktop (again, without opening the browser) then type a message in the search bar and the message gets posted in your friend’s Orkut Scrapbook. Amazing, isn’t it? The underlying theme in all the above examples is – unifying the advantages of the Web Applications with those of Desktop Applications – the new species of these hybrid Applications shall be called AIR Applications. And, the best thing about the AIR Applications is that any Web Developer can develop an AIR application with the knowledge he already has. No new learning is required.
What should the era of all such magnificent AIR Applications be called? We, at Techfest, call it AIR-O-MANIA. Do join us in our efforts to catalyze this magical transition from Web 2.0 to AIR. Visit http://techfest.org/competitions/codex/airomania/ for more details.
–
Team Techfest