Web 2.0 Architectures

Acknowledgments

We want to acknowledge Tim O’Reilly for bringing the revolution of the new Internet into focus. We also want to thank our families for giving us the time to work on this project, and our employers—Adobe, RedMonk, and Hinchcliffe & Company—for allowing us to dedicate our minds and resources to the book. Thanks also to our friends and others who have helped us over the years, whether they know it or not. These include the bloggers who expressed their opinions, the entrepreneurs who took ideas further than anyone expected, the standards world that created rules for allowing us to interoperate, the visionaries who broke those rules into little pieces to make something new, and you for taking the time to read this book.

Without naming everyone, there are some individuals who have played an especially important part in allowing this work to happen—our gratitude goes out to all of you.

Duane’s Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kevin Lynch, Michele Turner, and Jeff Whatcott from Adobe for letting this book take precedence over filing status reports (☺); my wife, Bettina Rothe, and my children for putting up with me during the process; Ted Patrick, James Ward, Prayank Swaroop, Alex Choy, Kumar Vora, the entire Adobe Platform Business Unit, Enrique Duvos, Ivan Koon, Eugene Lee, Waldo Smeets, John Hogerland, Ben Watson, Matt Mackenzie, Melonie Warfel, Ed Chase, Diana Helander, David Mendels, and Ben Forta and the Adobe Technical Evangelism team for challenging my intellect and generally being great people to work with; Rom Portwood for the blue hair idea and the Balvenie 21-year Portwood finish; Bobby Caudill (when is that demo tape coming???); Andre Charland (Nitobi and constant blogger); my bands 22^nd Century (http://www.mix2r.com/audio/by/artist/22nd_century) and Stress Factor 9 (http://www.myspace.com/stressfactor9); the guys and girls at Weissach for keeping the Porsche “tuned”; Matt and Trey, the creators of South Park, for inspiring me to reach for something lower and not be afraid, and Beavis and Butthead for inspiring me to create things that truly do not suck; Dilbert creator Scott Adams; Sim Simeonov, Danny Kolke, Greg Ruff, Ajit Jaokar, Jeremy Geelan, Tim Bray, and Mark Little (for taking time out of his busy schedule to help edit this book); Yefim Natis (Gartner); the entire staff at OASIS and UN/CEFACT; Bruce D’arcus (the guy whom I like the most despite the fact that we never agree ☺); Audrey Doyle; Gary Edwards; David RR Webber; Colleen Nystedt (friend, movie producer, and creator of MovieSet.com); Bob Sutor; Christian Heumer; Birgit Hoffmeister (for teaching me about modeling); Brian Eisenberg; Arofan Gregory (how was that Barcelona-ian brandy?); all the people involved in the creation of this book and O’Reilly Media for taking on the project; John Sowa for making sense of propositional algebra; Adam Pease for SUMO and for being an upstanding, approachable academic; David Luckham for sharing good Scotch over discussions on CEP; Gary Dunn; Dick Hardt (my Porsche is almost as fast as yours); Guy Kawasaki; Bob Glushko; Shantanu Narayen and Bruce Chizen, Adobe Systems CEOs, for inspiring me on a great humanitarian level and showing that corporate success and good community go hand in hand; all of Adobe PR for putting up with my antics; Johnny Rotten, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain (for their immense wisdom and teaching me that speaking the truth is never wrong); Peter Brown (who gets stuck with the next wine bill); Pam Deziel (I’ll invite you to wine if it’s Peter’s turn to buy); Marc Straat; Marc Eaman for drinking beer to help lower my wine bills and reminding me that old guys can play great ice hockey; Chuck Myers for not questioning my wine bills; and my friends and colleagues who have helped me over the years in this high-tech life.

James’s Acknowledgments

Although I have been a professional writer for more than 12 years, I have never worked on a book before. I must therefore thank Duane Nickull, who asked me to contribute to this project. Duane is one of the brightest people I have ever met (I keep the term godlike genius in my back pocket for him). I am glad Adobe gave him the time to pursue his ideas. This book is very much Duane’s, and as such I can only hope that my small contributions don’t detract from the overall quality. We didn’t always see eye to eye over Duane’s early drafts; it could be that my most important contributions were not sections I wrote, but pushback I provided.

The Synchronized Web idea came together on a great night at JavaOne 2006 in San Francisco at a party for JavaDB, organized by Rebecca Hansen with David Van Couvering. My partners in crime that night were David Berlind, Francois Orsini, and Patrick Chanezon. We were all enthused by the SynchWeb idea, so I figured it was not completely suboptimal. Slightly less than a year later, Robert Bruin, Sun Software’s CTO, name-checked Synchronized Web in his JavaOne keynote speech.

Declarative Living and Tag Gardening are concepts I have been thinking about for some time. David Weinberger and Clay Shirky must take the primary credit for anything good in my ideas, and none of the blame for any shortfalls. A key phrase from Weinberger haunted me and inspired me, and really drove me to want to express my own ideas on the subject of the power of tags and how they apply to so much of what is good and useful in Web 2.0:

Tagging instead creates piles of leaves in the hope that someone will figure out ways of putting them to use—perhaps by hanging them on trees, but perhaps creating other useful ways of sorting, categorizing, and arranging them.

David and Clay are the tree. I am adding a few leaves.

Just after agreeing to work on this book, I picked up Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become (O’Reilly). It was like being punched in the solar plexus, the book was so good. Morville captures many of the same ideas I wanted to, but with a degree of technical aptitude and scholarship I couldn’t hope to match. Ambient Findability remains a high bar for me, and a book I wish I had written. Thanks, Peter.

Other works that strongly influenced my thinking include John Battelle’s The Search (Portfolio) and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail (Hyperion). If you haven’t read these books, perhaps because you thought “I already read the blog,” I advise you to think again. Both works are excellent, solid in their own right, and add a great deal of depth and thinking to the expected central ideas. Declarative Living feeds Battelle’s Database of Intentions.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories of language games and communities of practice were another inspiration.

Many of my thoughts were firmed up in conversations with Stephen O’Grady, co-founder of RedMonk, whom I have to thank for not firing me when I needed to spend a bit of work time on the project, even though the majority of the work was done on my own time.

I didn’t take too much time away from my family to make my contributions, but I can’t thank my wife enough for making life such a pleasure, and for supporting me in all my endeavors. Natalie is enough of a Luddite to keep me sane, but not enough to drive me nuts; we dorks need “civilians” in our lives. Watching my son, Farrell, learn language has been like watching Tag Gardening in action. Fantastic. Thanks boy.

Finally, I want to thanks the hundreds, if not thousands, of bloggers who constantly make me smarter on a dizzying range of subjects. You all helped. My blog roll on Monkchips names many of you. Last, but definitely not least, thanks to everyone who commented on “early drafts” of my ideas on my blog. Alex Barnett, Danny Ayers, Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, Roo Reynolds, and Isabel Wang deserve a particular mention here. After all, good ideas only make sense in communities.

Wait! How could I not thank the people who built the services that have inspired so many of us—Josh Shacter of Delicious, and Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr? These people didn’t write the book; they created the future.

Dion’s Acknowledgments

Working on a book can be one of the most difficult projects, and one of the most (potentially) rewarding. I’d like to thank Duane Nickull for the gracious invitation to work on this book with him and James Governor. Of course, no book on Web 2.0 could omit thanks to O’Reilly Media and Tim O’Reilly for their groundbreaking work on bringing the concepts to the world. It’s been amazing to watch the rise of the next generation of the Web, and the blogosphere, of course, is one of the most fertile grounds for tracking new ideas and having open conversations about the disruptive trends and powerful new ideas that seem to emerge continuously in the living laboratory of the Web. My travels through the blogosphere in my researching and thinking around Web 2.0 have included the likes of Andrew McAfee, Nick Carr, Michael Arrington, Richard MacManus, Paul Kedrosky, Brady Forrest, Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Om Malik, Alex Barnett, David Ing, Dave Orchard, Mark Baker, Dare Obasanjo, Rod Boothby, Stowe Boyd, John Musser, Richard Monson-Haefel, Tim Bray, Steve Vinoski, Jeff Schneider, Sam Ruby, Martin Fowler, Stefan Tilkov, Don Box, Mark Nottingham, Phil Windley, and hordes of other online voices that have informed my work and ideas over the years.

Of course, I have to thank the folks who got us here and who make the Web in its current incarnation possible. Sir Tim Berners-Lee comes at the top of this list of giants. So too do Thomas Erl, the grand maven of SOA; Dave Winer, the genius behind many of the technologies we call Web 2.0; Roy Fielding, the brains behind HTTP and REST; Jesse James Garrett, the man behind the term AJAX; and hundreds of others too numerous to mention who all contribute to the global network that has changed our lives and businesses forever. Last, but certainly not least, thanks to the vast audience of participants on the Web itself, who have been creating it and shaping it over the past 15 years and have finally claimed it for themselves. It’s our Web now, and we haven’t looked back.

Naturally, no work of writing could be complete without those who make our personal and professional lives possible. I’d like to thank Kate Allen in particular, who has been my long-suffering business partner as we built an entire business around the world of Web 2.0, and who is principally responsible for all of the time that I was able to put into this book.