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As usual, Bill Scott has recently shared with us some of his keen insight into what makes Web 2.0 tick. In his latest post he introduces and defines the three (rich) dimensions of Web 2.0 as visual, interaction and data [1].

Before the arrival of so many AJaXified applications, data was the bottleneck through which the other two dimensions had to be squeezed. Now, developers are free to work in any dimension almost completely disjoint from the others using CSS, DOM and XMLHTTP for visual, interaction and data respectively.

I say almost because the choices you make in any dimension can and do influence the others (AJaX string theory). AJaX developers generally insist on minimalist and tightly coupled data communication methods; the reason for this is simple - if you pass SOAP, or worse, some WS-* compliant messages between the server and client you are going to have lots of extra data passed back and forth and will require more processing which both take time and reduce the usability of an application. Take Google for example, to get the best performance from their AJaX applications they generally return pure JavaScript or JSOR (JavaScript on the rocks). Doing this is great for a one-off customer facing application but when you want to share and open up data it becomes a lot of work to interoperate between Google, MSN and Amazon maps. In short, by making the data dimension more complicated to allow for say SOAP interoperability, we make the job of the DOM / JavaScripr dimension that much more difficult due to the increased overhead. This trade-off in performance has to be considered.

So as Web Services and all the standards that come under that umbrella are currently moving towards implementing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and (maybe even more importantly) the Semantic Web, were is AJaX going? What CSS and DOM trade-offs are we willing to make for the sake of rich data? Sure AJaX is young but let’s face it, everyone and their dog was using iFrames or XMLHTTP since the 90’s. AJaX and Web 2.0 developers should think about looking to SOA for guidance if we truly want to see rich data at its best. Let’s not get hung up on a Google map + housing listing “mashup” (not to say that I wasn’t excited to see it ) or worrying so much about back-buttons. We need to be driving development of Internet technologies on the client as well as hacking around and pushing the boundaries of the today’s Web!

Where do we go from here? In my previous post I discussed the synergies between SOA and AJaX [2] and in light of that discussion, I have been thinking about AJaX and how to create a truly data rich Internet application. Most of my thoughts end up at the sad conclusion that we are at the mercy of the web browser vendors that don’t have WS-* or even SOAP processing built-in (which Mozilla actually does have now ). Alternatively, maybe we should be looking at building a 4th dimension into AJaX applications of light weight standards based on the SOA tenets (discoverability, reusability, abstract models, policies)?

[1] Richness: The Web in 3D - Bill Scott, August 30, 2005
[2] SOAJaX: Where does SOA Stop and AJaX Begin- Dave Johnson, September 02, 2005