Web 2.0 Architectures

Developing Web 2.0 Patterns

During a conference brainstorming session in 2003, web pioneer Dale Dougherty observed that far from having “crashed” after the dot-com bust, the Internet was thriving and had become more important than ever. He was excited about the wide range of new applications coming online and the high frequency with which they were appearing. What’s more, the conference participants noted that the companies that had survived the Internet industry’s 2000–2002 collapse seemed to have some things in common. These observations led to the development of the concept of “Web 2.0.”

To foster a better understanding of Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly compiled a list comprising companies deemed Web 1.0 and those deemed Web 2.0, explaining his reasoning in his article “What Is Web 2.0.”^[9] This list of companies, discussed in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3, is among the most widely published artifacts used to explain Web 2.0, and it provided us with an excellent set of examples from which to draw patterns of common experience.

While we were mining the examples in Tim’s list, a set of abstract patterns emerged. Although the names we use in this book might not match precisely the patterns Tim discussed in his article,^[10] the concepts remain aligned. For example, we have renamed Tim’s “Cooperate, Don’t Control” pattern “Participation-Collaboration.” We developed the patterns using a single template, explained in Chapter 6, to express all of them in a consistent and unambiguous format. We present ...