Terms and definitions (1)

• AJAX - AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax has led to an increase in interactive animation on web pages.
  
  
• DOM - The Document Object Model is a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure and style of documents. The document can be further processed and the results of that processing can be incorporated back into the presented page.
  
  
• RIA - Rich Internet applications (RIAs) are web applications that have some of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of proprietary web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines. Examples of RIA frameworks include Adobe Flash, Java/JavaFX and Microsoft Silverlight.
  
  
• RSS - RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.
  
  
• RUBY ON RAILS - Ruby on Rails is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language.
  
  
• FOLKSONOMY - Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Folksonomy describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging.
  
  
• BITTORRENT - BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and by some estimates it accounts for about 35% of all traffic on the entire Internet.
  
  
• XMLHTTPREQUEST - XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is a DOM API that can be used by JavaScript and other web browser scripting languages to transfer XML and other text data between a web server and a browser. This type of AJAX architecture should not be confused with (XDR) XMLDomainRequest which is a lightweight form of XMLHttpRequest design by Microsoft which doesn't utilize XML-RPC.
  
  
• REST - REST is a term coined by Roy Fielding in his Ph.D. dissertation to describe an architecture style of networked systems. REST is an acronym standing for Representational State Transfer. Representational State Transfer is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use.
  
  
• WIKIS - A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranet and Knowledge Management systems. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work".
  
  B. Research Method
  
  When searching for web 2.0 terms and technologies, I usually utilize the World Wide Web Consortium website http://www.w3.org/. It has a wealth of information regarding new web technologies. I also use the top web 2.0 search engines and collaborative tools such as Google and Wikipedia. I have numerous books on the topic of Web 2.0 that I received when I attended a couple of Web 2.0 conferences in 2008.