AJAX+Some JIGNA+web 1.0 = web 2.0

Well!!!! This post sounds much technically than all other posts. So.....i can say this post is different from others. The origin of this post is due to my participation in the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) in our office. This competition is all about designing an interactive web application which should suffice the following two primary requirements

• Should be an insurance application.
• The application should use web2.0 to the maximum extent.

The hidden requirement in this competition is that my company (Shh..i don't want to disclose) want to show up this application to their clients and tell them the following.

Hey Guys!!!!!! Look at this fantastic application that we have designed in Web2.0. Now we have proved that we can do miracles in Web2.0. This also proves that, we can incorporate these miracles in your applications if you let us transform these legacy web1.0 application to web2.0. We bet that there won't be any side effects and performance issues.

Yeah....!!!!! New bubble has already come in. Any Guesses...Whats gonna be that new bubble...

Yeah thats Web2.0.

To give an introduction to Web 2.0, Its neither a technology,nor a new version of any OS. But its a new generation of the web applications. This introduces more user friendlyness to the applications by providing a very good interfaces and new enhancements to the web applications. Here goes some of the features of the Web2.0.

- A web2.0 website should be completely interactive and dynamic with a friendly user-interface established on the latest web2.0 engineerings like AJAX.

- Web2.0 websites should deliver web established applications to Internet users and allowing them to do utilization of these applications through a web browser.

- A web2.0 website should implement social networking capablenesses allowing users to interact with each other and create friend lists.

- A web2.0 website should be a democratic website where users will be able to add value by interacting with the web established application.

- A Web2.0 websites should permit it's users to exert various controls over the website data and content (adding/deleting/editing content).

The decision is that web2.0 websites are construct on participatory web established applications focusing basically on user experience and collaboration.

Representatives of successful web2.0 websites

Although this new Internet revolution or trend is not widespread among web developers or Internet venders yet, 1000000s of users are actually participating in such websites. Not a plenty of them are aware of the web2.0 construct but they are already an active component part of it.

The following are some of the websites that are successful in using Web2.0.

- YouTube.com : YouTube has become popular among of its user interaction features. The features like User comments on a video, Reporting an abused content, rating a video, Thumbs up and down for a particular content, subscription to a category of videos, make it much popular among the video sites. The construct of YouTube is very simple. It permits Internet users to share their favorite picture files with the entire creation.

- Wikipedia: The most famous online cyclopaedia. The one reason that this has become popular than any other encyclopedia is, the feature that allows any user to get in and write/correct the content of any article. So, if one user is wrong in writing something, there are 1000000's of users/judges to correct his mistake.

- Sociable Bookmarking websites like Digg.com : The popular features that makes this popular are

1. User comments on a bookmark.
2. Voting feature, where multiple users can vote for an article or bookmark. The easies way to find the most liked bookmark/website is the one with maximum number of votes.
   

- MySpace.com: I wagered you've heard of MySpace.com. This website will permit you to create your own profile, friend list and personal homepage adding whatever you want on it (textual matter, mental images, pictures, nexus, etc). It will also permit to share your profile and web page with other MySpace users. Amazingly simple but so clever. MySpace.com is now one of the most saw websited in the entire Internet.

Whats common in all of these websites:

The web2.0 construct. These websites are active web established applications. They all permit internet users to actively participate and customize the style the website looks and experiences, thus giving the pleasance and belief of collaborating to the online community. The web2.0 is so evolutionary because of it's simpleness and it will gone even more widespread among website decorators and internet venders.

Back to RIA:

Getting back to the RIA, we had a meeting with all the big heads in our project for an application that we are going to design. After taking a lot of comments from them, we finally have decided to do a Quoting application, where user can request for a quote from an insurance company by keying in all the required details.

This is basically the quoting application for an automobile corporation where in the user is supposed to key in the details of the model number, name name and other stuff. For this we have listed down all the features of Web2.0.

Now..the question is where to use these in Quoting application???? We had a look at some of popular insurance websites like Metlife and Geico.We found some of the features in these websites that we can take in to consideration. Geico has a very nice interface to enter the details of the quote. The data entry starts with asking the Pin Number with which it will automatically fill up some of the data in it.

The important feature we liked in Gaico is the notifications on the front page talking about the benefits availed by different existing customers. Giving the pincode in the opening page will auto fill the corresponding entry inside the quotes. The other feature we wanted to make use in Geico is percentage indicator.

The Percentage indicator shows the percentage of completion of the quote. The another feature, which can have some scope of showing improvement in our application is....User can not move to the second tab until he completes all the entries in the first tab.

We felt that we can take this up and make all the tabs editable at any point of time for the convenience of the user.

Sorry guys...i have to stop this here..Coz i have to concentrate on implementation than documentation. Hope i will look back to this post to give you the complete information.