Book Review: Web 2.0 Architectures

Posted by Big Mad Kev on February 25, 2010

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This is a great book for Developers, Architects and Entrepreneurs alike. It takes the complex subject of Web 2.0 and boils it down to about 12 Patterns. Which will help anyone with an Idea for a Web 2.0 product which pattern to base their Idea on or even how to better the idea like it has with me, I have an idea for a web 2.0 and this book has given me some great ideas on how to round it off and also what not to do etc.

So the book is made up of 8 chapters, all of which are quite bit sized apart from Chapter 7 where each of the design patterns are described in detail, and this takes up a good 50% of the book and so it should.

The points that are brought up in the book, are very thought provoking and also helps you understand where the current major web 2.0 players got their ideas and how they rounded them out to become the players there are.

Chapter 3, gives examples of the old Web 1.0 applications to the Web 2.0 equivalent namely:

  • DoubleClick and Google AdSense
  • Ofoto and Flickr
  • Akamai and BitTorrent
  • MP3.com and Napster
  • Britannica Online and Wikipedia
  • Personal Websites and Blogs
  • Screen Scraping and Web Services

How many of us had to create an application that had to scrap information from a site and every time they did a refresh you had to tweak you app; thank god for the evolution of the web service and the business brains of the top companies realising the benefits of exposing their data.

So if you have a Web 2.0 idea in your (Like they say there is a book in us all, I say;mso-spacerun: yes">  there is a Web 2.0 Idea in there too) or if you work for a company that has Web 2.0 aspirations’ this book will help you see the business as a Design Pattern and match it to how others have done it, (ok it properly won’t be an exact match nothing ever is as we are all different and Web 2.0 applications have to be to else they will die. ) 50% of the book is taken up by chapter 7 which discusses these patterns.:

  • The Service-Oriented Architecture Pattern
  • The Software as a Service (SaaS) Pattern
  • The Participation-Collaboration Pattern
  • The Asynchronous Particle Update Pattern
  • The Mashup Pattern
  • The Rich User Experience Pattern
  • The Synchronized Web Pattern
  • The Collaborative Tagging Pattern
  • The Declarative Living and Tag Gardening Pattern
  • The Semantic Web Grounding Pattern
  • The Persistent Rights Management (PRM) Pattern
  • The Structured Information Pattern

All in all I found this book to be a great read, and very informative and thought provoking and would recommend to Developers, Managers, Technical Architects and Entrepreneurs like.