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Learning to love Web 2. (BBC News): “I’ve been sceptical about Web 2.0, since although there are a lot of cool toys out there, the idea that you can solve the problems of distributed computing by rewriting webpages on the fly seems rather optimistic, to say the least. But I’m starting to come round, if only because the explosion of creativity on the part of those developing new services and applications is so impressive. Part of the problem is of course trying to define the term Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly, the publisher and net advocate, coined it but he seems content to let it remain vague enough to encompass almost any web-based service that doesn’t rely on static HTML pages.Add this article to Del.icio.usRead 267 more articles from BBC News sorted by date, popularity, or title.”

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How Web 2.0 Killed Microsoft: “Operating Systems Hardly Matter Any More I believe, now more than ever, that the operating system running your computer is irrelevant to your success. Your operating system is not that important to you as an individual. I still believe that operating systems are important, but only from an organization or industry point of view. Someone still […]”

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Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1: “MrByte420 writes ‘The Ruby On Rails team today released version 1.1 of the web framework. From the announcement: ‘Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.’ New features were examined back in February at Scottraymond.net and include Javascript/AJAX integration, enhancements to active record, and enhanced testing suites. Not to mention upgrading this time promises to be a piece of cake.'”

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Round-up of 30 Ajax tutorials: “There are lots of people writing lots of tutorials about Ajax, apparently, and Max Kielser has created a list of 30 of them. The MDC’s short-but-sweet AJAX:Getting Started tutorial is included.”

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Too Many Ajax Calendars: “On his blog, Joel Spolsky, has posted some of his opinions on the proliferation of Ajax-enabled calendering systems that have been coming out lately – and how none of them seem to be up to the mark. For all the Ajax calendars that are appearing, it’s a shame I can’t find one which really meets my needs. I tried out Trumba, Kiko, 30 Boxes, Yahoo! Calendar, and Spongecell. I couldn’t recommend any of them. My needs are probably weird, but not that weird. Further on in the post he mentions the simple needs he’s looking for but hasn’t found yet – things like: ‘enter flights’, ‘understand timezones’, and ‘print out something reasonable’. He also touches on the ‘ship early and often’ mantra that so many largely anticipated sites seem to be following, without talking the time to fully develop a product that everyone won’t think is ‘lame’ when they look and see it unfinished. He wraps it up with his theory as to why there are so many of these Ajax calendars popping up lately. According to him, it boils down to the creation of hype to try to garner corporate interest to, hopefully, get snatched up as the ‘Next Big Thing’. “

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Web Trends 2006 for Web Developers: “2006 is just around the corner, and that means that it is time to bring some (vague) predictions for this web business we are in. The AJAX hype will go on – but eventually fail The rather sickening hype of AJAX is going to continue, and it will get very big in the first 6-8 months of 2006. But, as the end of 2006 nears AJAX, is going to fail. The reason is not because of AJAX itself – AJAX (or AHAX) is great tool. But, you do not base your decisions on a specific tool. You base your decisions on solving people’s problems and goals. If AJAX turns out to be useful in a certain scenario – use it. Remember that we have been able to do what AJAX does for a long time – with frames. Frames were also at some point surrounded with hype, how many of us have created sites where only a small part of it changed. But, in the end we realized that this cool thing really got in the way of more important stuff. This does not mean that AJAX will go away – rather the inverse. It will be a reduced to what it really is – a tool, and effectively hidden from both the developers and the end-user. Web 2.0 is going to be the next ‘dot.com’ wave The Web 2.0 driven community is going to start our next big dot.com wave. Although it will not be as big as the first one and the money involved will be “

AJAX and Multibyte Character Support: “Taylan Pince has a post on his blog that looks at an issue several don’t think about when developing pages/applications with Ajax – multibyte caharacter support. I love AJAX, and I realize that there are more than enough tutorials on the subject floating around the web these days (my favourite is still the one over at the Apple Developer Connection). But when I wanted to use a simple AJAX menu for a site I was developing in Turkish, I quickly realized that there are some issues about character encoding in dynamically loaded AJAX elements, and that there are no apparent solutions. He creates a solution in a few simple lines of code to make the script the Ajax connection calls use a properly formatted UTF-8 content type. The code is there to take advantage of, as well as a simple function-based usage method he suggests. “

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IBM Leads “Open AJAX” Coalition of Web 2.0 Vendors: “According to this new article on the Ajax Developer’s Journal today, IBM is spearheading a new effort to promote Ajax to developers all around the world – the “Open Ajax” Coalition. The Open AJAX initiative does not have a centralized structure or website, but is rather an idea that is being formally backed by BEA, Borland, the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra. A spokesperson for one of the major backers said that Google will also be backing this initiative. The coalition members say they “intend to promote Ajax’s promise of universal compatibility with any computer device, application, desktop or operating system, and easy incorporation into new and existing software programs.” The article continues on, noting capabilities of Ajax, as well as the fact that this coalition is not just “lip service”. Commitments have already been started by several of the main participants (such as IBM already contributing to the Eclipse project). There are various other quotes from notables in the community as well, including Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), Scott Dietzen (Zimbra), and Steve Benfield (Agentis Software). “

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Ajax Flashcards: “Darrell Brogdon has created a new flashcard website. PHPFlashcards presents questions on PHP, Ajax-style . I don’t know about you, but tedious page refreshes is one thing that keeps me away from many flashcard/quiz sites. The solution here eliminates those – you click an option and a “Correct”/”Incorrect” status appears and fades away, and your overall score is updated. “

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IBM in the News: AJAX, DB2, LAMP: “IBM in the News: AJAX, DB2, LAMP February 3rd, 2006 There have been some very exciting developments from IBM over the last few weeks. Here are four…”

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