Assignment #9

After playing around with Yahoo Pipes for a while, I realized that there is a lot of power behind such a simple idea. Create one web page that has the power to search for anything. Using these pipes you can gather a lot of information from multiple sources, from a centralized location. At first I found Yahoo Pipes to be a bit confusing. While I understood what was being done, I had a problem creating my own working Pipe. After searching and studying previously created Pipes, I finally grasped enough of how they worked to make my own. The pipe I created, which can be found at This Page brings together Flickr and Google to do a variety of different searches.

With the introduction of Web 2.0 the world is able to upload and share information with everyone in the world. Instead of companies and other web sites telling us what to look at, we are able to upload our own information and create our own websites. Yahoo Pipes is helping us gather information from different blogs and other various Web 2.0 sites, along with non Web 2.0 sites. The user will type in what he/she wants to search for, and the search looks for all items that have been tagged with the same information.

AJAX is somewhat the same, yet different at the same time. AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript, is used to help create interactive web pages. Instead of reloading whole web pages, AJAX exchanges small bits of information with the server, behind the scenes, which gives web pages much faster load time. This also gives the creator/user a much more enjoyable time, as they don’t have to constantly wait for their information to stay updated.

So, how does Yahoo Pipes incorporate both of these new ways of thinking? Well, after you have created your Pipes, you can publish it and let the world see and use your newest creation. This satisfies the Web 2.0 portion, so how does AJAX fit in? Yahoo has made creating various Pipes very easy. You simply drag and drop different pieces and connect the pieces with pipes. This method of construction is using AJAX. You are adding new content to the web page constantly, but the whole page doesn’t keep reloading. That is because each time you move part of your design, small amounts of information is sent to the server, updating your page to work seamlessly.

This fits in nicely with our conversations about Service Oriented Architecture as it is very user friendly, and will work for anyone who can run the Internet. There is no special program that needs to be installed on your machine to have this work, which in turn, benefits the most people.

It is amazing how we use this technology every day, but most people don’t understand a thing about it. As long as it works, people are happy. Really though, if it wasn’t for Web 2.0 and AJAX being implemented in this project, it wouldn’t have quite the same effect on as many people as it is.