With the ever-increasing pace of technological change, it is hard to predict the winners and losers in the marketplace. For instance, the builders and engineers of the so-called Web 2.0 social online explosion based their web-based applications on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology. This power lay dormant for years, hidden in the vague details of JavaScript and ActiveX components. The change was rapid and learning professions are only now fully coming to terms with the implications in terms of interactive, responsive, and socially-aware ecosystems.
An application builder, to save further work when the technology changes, needs to decouple the graphical user experience from the underlying services, the business model, and the data. That way sites can be archived, whether they are the course, project, or resource sites, but the same data reused no matter what the evolutionary pressures and workflow changes are.
Today, most users still interact with online...