One of the reasons I have been too busy to blog these days is the project to write a comprehensive book about Web 2.0 technologies.
If Web 2.0 is about using the web as a platform, this platform is far from being homogeneous. On the contrary, it is made of a number of very different pieces of technology, from CSS to web server configuration through XML, Javascript, server side programming, HTML, …
I believe that integrating these technologies is one of the main challenges of Web 2.0 developers and I am always surprised if not frightened to see that people tend to get more and more specialized. Too many CSS gurus do not know the first thing about XML, too many XML gurus don’t know how to spell HTTP, too many Java programmers don’t want to know Javascript. And, no, knowing everything about Ajax isn’t enough to write a Web 2.0 application.
To the defense of these hyper-specialists, I have also found that most of the available resources, both online and in print, are even more heavily specialized than their authors and that even if you could read a book on each of these technologies you’d find it difficult to get the big picture and understand how they can be used together.
The goal of this book is fill the gap and be a useful resource for all the Web 2.0 developers who do not want to stay in their highly specialized domain as well as for project managers who need to grasp the Web 2.0 big picture.
This is an ambitious project on which I have started to work in December 2005.
The first phase has been to define the book outline with the helpful contribution of many friends.
The second one has been to find an editor. O’Reilly who is the editor of my two previous books happens to be also one of the co-inventors of the term « Web 2.0 » and that makes them very nervous about Web 2.0 book projects.
Jim Minatel from Wiley has immediately been convinced by the outline and the book will be published in the Wrox Professional Series.
I had initially planned to write the book all by myself but it would have taken me at least one year to complete this work and Jim wasn’t appealed by the idea of waiting until 2007 to get this book in print.
The third step has been to find the team to write the book and the lucky authors are:
Micah Dubinko is tech editing the book and Sara Shlaer is our Development Editor.
We had then to split the work between authors. The exercise has been easier than expected. Being in a position to arbiter the choice, I have found it fair to pick the chapters left by other authors and this leaves me with chapters that will require a lot of researches for me. This is fine since I like learning new things when I write but this also means more hard work.
This is my first co-authored book and I think that one of the challenges of these books is to keep the whole content coherent. This is especially true for a book which goal is to give « the big picture » and to explain how different technologies play together.
To facilitate the communication between authors, I have set up a series of internal resources (wiki, mailing list, subversion repository). It’s still too early to say if that will really help but the first results are encouraging.
More recently, I have also set up a public site (http://web2.0thebook.org/) that presents the book and aggregates relevant content. I hope that all these resources will help us to feel and act as a team rather than a set of individual authors.
The « real » work has finally started and we have now the first versions of our first chapters progressing within the Wiley review system.
It’s interesting to see the differences between processes and rules from different editors. To me, a book was a book and I hadn’t anticipated so many differences not only in the tools being used but also in style guidelines.
The first chapter I have written is about Web Services and that’s been a good opportunity to revisit the analysis I had done in 2004 for the ZDNet Web Services Convention [papers (in French)].
From a Web 2.0 developer perspective, I think that the main point is to publish Web Services that are perfectly integrated in the Web architecture and that means being as RESTfull as possible.
I have been happy to see that WSDL 2.0 appears to be making some progress in its support of REST Services even though it’s still not perfect yet. I have posted a mail with some of my findings to the Web Services Description Working Group comment list and they have split these comments as three issues on their official issue list ([CR052] [CR053] [CR054]).
I wish they can take these issues into account, even if that means updating my chapter!
Some resources I have found most helpful while I was writing this chapter are:
- The paper presented by Leigh Dodds at XTech 2005.
- Paul Prescod REST resources including his « Evaluating WSDL’s HTTP Support » and « State Transition » pieces. I had discovered the latest one in 2004 and find it as enjoyable to read each time I come back.
It’s been fun so far and I look forward to seeing this book « for real ».