Over at Hacknot , there's an article criticizing recent trends amongst the Web 2.0 crowd. Admittedly, I've snickered to myself as well when I hear former PHP programmers rave breathlessly about what was previously considered common programming knowledge (well, the acronyms are new anyway), but there's something more afoot than all the hype and in fact it's this very hype that's letting the real deal slip by unnoticed by the author of that article.

I was reading about Amazon's new web services (S3 , EC2 , etc) and it slowly dawned on me what Web 2.0 is really about (yes, I'm quick, some of you are surely thinking). Web 2.0 isn't about MVC frameworks or AJAX (formerly known as "hey my browser actually works") or rounded corners or spinning GIFs or finding a way to make an 800px wide page look like it's not.

Web 2.0 is about putting the web back on the web. By that I mean not on your server . It means the end of shopping carts that aren't run on Amazon. It means the end of Gallery in favor of Flickr. It means the end of blogs not on Blogger. It means your "custom" application will consist of regurgitating data from these services and presenting it in a new way.

There's a key element to all of this: open API's. This is really the meat of "Web 2.0". The API (usually REST, but XML-RPC as well. Even RSS and Atom are part of it) has come to web applications. Much like Microsoft Office brought real vertical applications to the desktop with VBA/COM, Web 2.0 brings vertical applications (aka "mashups") to the web. In a way, the hype is kind of necessary to this process. Since none of this stuff is really new (only new to the web and the programmers who inhabit it), if it were called the same thing it was called 20 years ago, no one would care or even notice.

There's a bit of ego involved in running a website (gasp) and I think many people are reluctant to have, say their shopping cart on Amazon rather than be custom coded so that visitors "never have to leave my site". Well, those days are over. Having your cart on Amazon is not only easier, safer and more reliable, but you'll increase your sales (duh!). It's a bit like the vanity of having your own storefront versus putting your product on the shelf at a large supermarket. The storefront gives you personal satisfaction. The supermarket gives you sales. Since I'm singling out Amazon, I'll point out that even large retailers who can afford to run their own sites are using Amazon (Toys 'R Us for one). It's just smart business. It costs less to develop and moves more product. A real no-brainer. You also don't need to worry about the plethora of problems already solved (redundancy, scalability) by the larger service providers. Of course, with the web API you can have your cake and eat it too, having a regular site that integrates with a larger service, although there are some sacrifices you'll be asked to make by most of the service providers (the external link, OMG!).

I've been slowly building a toolkit that I'm just as slowly realizing is obsolete before it will ever be finished. I've been planning on writing a custom shopping cart for it but am realizing that hey, what's the point. Instead I'll be writing stuff that interfaces with API's and leaving the hard work for others.

Anyway, I suppose I'm not really addressing the article that prompted me to write this, but what's the point. The author apparently thinks Rails is an ORM and Python is only known by a few enthusiasts, so I may as well dredge up a Mesohippus and flog it as argue against him. It appears to me he's caught up in the hype just as surely as the "fanboys" he criticizes, staring at the sun while the polar caps melt around him. It doesn't matter which side of the hype you are caught up in. Pro or con, it interferes in your ability to make unbiased assessments. Frankly, the arrogance of assuming that everyone else is caught up in the hype but you alone are above all that is enough to make DHH seem humble by comparison.