Web 2.0 and Software Architecture

Since I returned from maternity leave, I've been chatting to lots of colleagues about all the exciting technologies and industry development related to Web 2.0.

I must admit I don’t really have much of an opinion or insight into this yet, but my gut feeling tells me that while everyone is focusing on the ‘User experience’, coming up with visually stunning designs and coolest gadgets and mind-blowing new scenarios through mashups, someone still needs to worry about the ‘quality aspects’ of these web applications, ie. the performance, scalability, security, reliability characteristics of the application architecture and infrastructure behind the scene, so that when the web application/web service/mashup component becomes successful, going out to the web reaching millions of people, the user experience is such that the users don’t even notice the technology delivering high performance and scalability behind the scene, the various quality attributes of the system is so good that the users can just focus on ‘having a great user experience on the web’.

I'm hoping to cover some of these important software architecture design and development techniques in my future blogs...