I recently attended the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco. Overall, I’d say it was just another overblown marketing scheme by Oreilly. It makes for an interesting situation when you have an event sporting a title of which no one can agree on the definition.

There were several good presentations, very few of which had anything to do with what Tim O’Reilly described as Web 2.0 ish, but good nevertheless.

Apollo
This was probably the most impressive product demo durring the conference. It’s basically a shot at bridging the gap between the desktop and the webtop. It’s a move in the opposite direction from what Microsoft is doing with its XAML efforts. While Microsoft is trying to take the fat client to the web, Adobe is taking the thin web client to the desktop.
You can take your existing content and front end code (HTML, Javascript, XML, Flash, Flex, etc…) and deploy it as a desktop application. It then includes all sorts of APIs for data synchronization (for occasionally connected users), file i/o, and socket/threading work.
The other major focus here is for device portability. One of the major recurring themes of the conference was the importance of mobile computing and Apollo aims to help application developers create apps that work on the desktop, the web, and the portable, all with the same web technologies.
Another huge benefit is that all Apollo apps are cross platform. It’s still an early (alpha) product, but something to keep an eye on.

Web development frameworks
There was a ton of attention in this area. Ajax frameworks, RIA (rich internet apps), RAD (rapid app. dev.) tools. The major focus in this area was on the emergence of the dynamic language frameworks. Primary focus was given to Ruby on Rails, python frameworks Django and TurboGears, and Javascript frameworks Dojo and Prototype. The focus of course was how they purportedly defeat ASP.NET 2 and JSF in terms of productivity. These frameworks are all about productivity and the demos were geared towards showing how efficient development in these environments can be. The demos were fairly impressive. I was surprised to see the adoption rate of these new technologies by some of the major companies. Amazon has 3 or 4 major Ruby on Rails apps rolled out now (all integrated with their SOA) and they stated that they will continue to invest in, and contribute to the Rails project. Google and Yahoo are doing some very interesting things with the Python tools and showed some pretty amazing demos.
Each day, for an hour, they brought up 3 companies that gave a demo on an emerging product. All 9 of these projects were built using these new frameworks.

User interfaces
Every demo and product I saw was beautiful. There were several presentations on user interfaces and the importance of creating applications that are easy to use. One quote I really liked was “The days of acceptably ugly user interfaces is over”. I’m hoping that our new designers will help bring us out of our ugly U/I slump. The only demos that showed weakness in this area were the RAD tools.

User generated content and collaboration
Naturally there was a lot of talk about user generated content (Wikis, Blogs, Forums, Photos, Videos, etc…) and the proper organization of this information. This is an area that has room for a lot of innovation.
They talked a little bit about Base Camp as a project management tool and it’s focus on collaboration and team productivity rather than individual productivity. There are some interesting management styles emerging here that are very different from the traditional ones we employ today and make a lot of sense. Both Google, Amazon and Yahoo raved about the efficiencies of small, collaborative teams (yes, the agile stuff again), and how they have been able to get products to market faster (see yahoo pipes).

I was surprised, and somewhat relieved that SOA was hardly even mentioned. This conference was geared more to the small, startup tech companies rather than the huge enterprise systems, but nevertheless, from conference inundated with buzz words it was a comforting surprise.