Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications

This in-depth workshop provides an exploration of the next generation of techniques for creating compelling and highly competitive web applications. Designed especially for the web architect and product manager, this session closely examines the latest trends, best practices, and emerging techniques for leveraging Web 2.0 concepts in web applications to achieve high levels of growth, innovation, and user adoption.

The first half of the workshop will take a look at the specific design and technology approaches that have built the current market leaders while also taking a hard look at emerging yet promising new techniques. This session will open by providing a detailed examination of the best methods for turning a web application into a successful open platform to drive growth through the use of open Web APIs with REST, JSON, and ATOM. The key success factors for the underpinning business models of open web platforms, including brief case studies, will be presented. Designing for consumption in mashups and third party web apps will also be covered.

The very latest rich user experience platforms will be explored including Ajax, Adobe’s AIR, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and Sun’s JavaFx with an eye towards how to take advantage of their individual strengths to create new, highly compelling user experiences not previously possible, including the next generation of mobile devices.

This session will then look in detail at the latest in web identity models with a focus on how to use OpenId and other popular web single-sign on models to offer users the identity choices they’ll prefer in the near future. The cutting edge of social distribution channels will be explored through the latest field research in Open Social, Facebook application, and lifestreaming models and how best to package and distribute your web application within popular and high volume social ecosystems.

The second half of the workshop explores the architectures and cutting edge development models of Web 2.0 era applications circa 2008. The latest techniques for designing applications out of other pre-existing online platforms such as AWS, Google’s APIs, and many others will be given with specific examples for dramatically cutting the cost and time to market of modern web applications. The latest in emergent architecture techniques, large-scale testing approaches, and rapid scalability methods will round out the workshop and finish with an informative survey of the latest productivity-oriented development platforms for creating highly effective web applications including Ruby on Rails 2.0, Cake PHP, Groovy, and others.

The workshop will conclude with a brief Q & A session and forward look at the upcoming set of next generation trends.