Web 2.0, professional… and Fun!

Phew! said Danny Ayers, relieved said Erik Bruchez. Our upcoming Web 2.0 book is written and it’s been both hard work but also fun.

This book is a long story, almost as long as my interest for Web 2.0…

A long time Web and XML expert, the marketing around Web 2.0 kept me away for a while and I didn’t bother to take a look at what is behind the smoke before December 2005 when the business networking initiative sparklingPoint Networking invited me to present my analysis of Web 2.0.

I have published my presentation both in English on my blog and in French on XMLfr. The French version has rapidly become the most read article on XMLfr and one of the reference definitions of Web 2.0 in French.

These documents go through the so called social and technical layers of Web 2.0 and note that yes, Web 2.0 is nothing but a new term to designate the Web as it was meant to be. Does that make the word pointless? I don’t think so. Nobody can deny that the web is changing and finding a word to name this new web is most useful.

One of the things that really stuck me was the number of technologies involved in Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 is anything but a coherent platform! There is nothing wrong in using a whole set of technologies except that you need to keep the vision of the big picture. This goes against another tendency which is to specialise people and resources.

Most of the technologies that constitute the Web 2.0 technology stack, from (X)HTML to databases through CSS, Javascript or HTTP, are getting more complex everyday and most of the books available focus on only one of these technologies. This does not only mean that you need to buy a full bookshelf if you want to cover the Web 2.0 stack, but also that most of these books hardly cover how these technologies can be used together.

Web 2.0 Professional Programming is born from this analysis and tries to give the big picture by presenting the whole Web 2.0 stack.

Erik kindly wrote that this book owes everything to Eric van der Vlist, who provided the vision, outline, and much more over those last few months. I’d rather say that I am the only responsible for the incoherences and misses that you might find in the outline and the writers (including me) are responsible for the good things that you’ll find in their chapters!

This book also owes a lot to the friends which have helped me to write the outline before I submitted it to publishers, to Jim Minatel our Senior Acquisitions Editor who believed in the project from the very beginning, to Sara Shlaer our editor and to Micah Dubinko our tech reviewer.

Both the book and the writing experience turned out to be quite different from what I had expected.

When I first submitted my outline to several publishers I had planed to write this book, like my previous books, alone and over a period of twelve to eighteen months. If Jim Minatel was quite happy with my original outline, he was less than appealed by my agenda! WROX has a lot of experience with multi-authored books and he gently convinced me to build a team to cut the delays.

The team has been constituted with a mix of authors that I knew and authors who were previous WROX authors and this has been a good decision: a more homogeneous team would probably not have been able to provide the diversity of points of view that you will find in this book.

The authors were spread between the Silicon Valley, UK, Italy, Switzerland and France and I had anticipated that communication could be an issue. To facilitate the writing, I have setup a bunch of internet based goodies including a mailing list, an IRC channel, a wiki, a subversion repository to share our prose and code samples and an external web site.

This has proven to work very efficiently and Jim wrote: What I really love about working with this gang of authors […] is how relentless they are about communicating and collaborating with each other.

The mailing list has been widely used all over the period and it has been critical to keep contact between the whole team. The wiki has been very helpful to finalize the outline. One of my regrets is that we’ve not used it to edit the whole book… My previous book (RELAX NG) has been edited on a wiki and transformed into DocBook before publication and I have found that very handy. I am pretty confident that we could have used the same method to edit this book but that was breaking too much of the WROX policies and we’ve not followed that way. The subversion repository has been used by most writers more like a backup than as a repository but here again it was not aligned on the WROX policies. We’ve used the IRC only once to solve a controversial issue on the outline.

The writing itself went very smoothly with everyone doing his best to be on schedule. Joe Fawcett wrote in his blog: One of the great things about writing is how much you learn. It’s easy to pick a passing knowledge of a subject but when have to write about it and provide working code examples then you really need to burrow down and learn. I couldn’t agree more with his statement and have been surprised again to see how much you learn by writing!

The main difficulty of this book is that since its goal is to give the « big picture », it needs to be coherent between chapters which is always difficult for multi-authored books. Also, since the agenda was very tight, we couldn’t afford to spend too much time building a very detailed outline. Keeping things coherent has been the job of Sara and Micah and they’ve done a good job checking the cross references, redundancies and other incoherences.

The other difficulty is that the target audience are « professional developers with no prior experience of Web 2.0 » and deciding what the prerequisites for this book are was quite subjective. On one hand, we would like this book to be a central place where people can find most of what they need to write Web 2.0 applications. On the other hand, we couldn’t afford to introduce each of the technologies from scratch. We’ve done our best to guess what most of you already know about web technologies at large, but the result may sometimes seem arbitrary. For instance, we’ve presented HTTP from scratch because we think that this is an area where there are still a lot of misconceptions, but we’ve assumed that our readers are already somewhat familiar with HTML. Your reviews will tell if we need to change this in future editions!

Even if I knew that Sara and Micah were carefully tracking inconsistencies, I was rather anxious to know what the book would like too as a whole and as soon as I got enough chapters written and some extra time, I started reviewing as a whole. I am rather happy with the result and think that this should be a useful resource for web developers. The only regret I have is about the number of programming languages we’ve covered.

Server side, there isn’t a programming language of choice to write Web 2.0 applications and my attempt was that the book should not only be as agnostic as possible but also provide examples using as many different programming languages as possible. I think that the book can be considered agnostic, but the examples are not using as many languages as I would have liked: Java, C# and PHP represent most of the examples and Python, Perl or Ruby users may feel frustrated.

Still, I really believe that they can easily understand the examples in this book. A great way to follow the explanations given in the book is of course to try the examples. A still healthier exercise is to translate these examples in your favorite programming language. If you do so, I strongly encourage you to post these translations on the forum dedicated to this book on the WROX web site.

Writing this book has ben fun and I hope that reading it will be an enjoyable experience too!