The Internet is transforming society and business. The current wave of this technology revolution, called Web 2.0, followed the initial wave (Web 1.0) that collapsed with the dot.com boom and bust. Today, ‘always-on’, pervasive broadband is making access to the Internet easy enough for it to be no longer considered as a ‘technology’ but parts of the fabric of modern living, like the telephone or television. The key advantages of using the Internet can be summed up as ‘always on and everywhere’, reachable from mobile devices, laptops, and desktop machines.
Innovations in modern browsers allowed vendors to build the first RWA: applications which could split the application logic between presentation logic that runs on the client-side and business logic and data models that run on the server-side. The rich Web application User Interface (UI) is as ‘rich’ as in desktop applications, and runs in the browser using a combination of languages. One of the pioneering vendors – Adaptive Systems – called this approach Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX – although the preferred naming culture is now just Ajax). All modern browsers support JavaScript and this means that with Ajax there is just a small JavaScript rendering engine which is downloaded and held in memory while the application is running.
