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As the world wide web transforms from a vehicle of information dissemination and e-commerce transactions
into a writable nexus of human collaboration, the Web 2.0 technologies at the forefront of the tranformation
may be seen as special cases of a more general shift in the conceptual application model of the web.

The classic 3-tier model has the web browser and OS on a thin client tier, the traditional server tier
offerings for data persistence and workflow or business process managment, and a fat middle tier
of custom JEE code. The custom middle tier code has two responsibilities. It has to invoke all
the server tier API calls necessary to perform business transactions, persist data and the like.
But frankly, the server tier has received work for decades, so its scalable, robust and has well-defined
easy to use APIs. So, the bulk of the work in today's web applications consists of back-filling for the
underpowered thin client tier. To achieve a single business transaction, we have to do a complicated
juggling act of the multiple pages, some only conditionally presented, each collecting some small amount
of information that has to be validated, and the results aggregated until the transaction is ready.

The Web 2.0 application model is essentially a 2-tier model. It was a little hard to recognize that this
transition was happening in the early days when Web 2.0 just meant blogs and wikis. At that time, Web 2.0
just meant content democratization, which is the idea that non-technical users could create and
share content on the web without needing to involve web application programmers. This was quite
rightly viewed as a revolutionary breakthrough because it did for the web what the word processor did for
the personal computer. But if you remember that it takes two points to make a line, and then look at
at the history of the personal computer, it's trajectory as a revolution did not become evident
until the second killer application of computing, the spreadsheet. This application created what we call
process democratization. This is the idea that non-technical users, or semi-programmers,
could define how computing power would be dispensed to solve problems without needing to involve high-end
application programmers. This was revolutionary because the non-technical users who were enabled to define
their own processes were closer to the business problems and also far more numerous. The same thing is
now happening on the web, and it is the next phase of Web 2.0.

The Web 2.0 server tier is smarter than it used to be, exposing its capabilities directly to the
Web 2.0 client tier with web services, REST services, or feeds and ATOM publishing.
Similarly, the Web 2.0 client tier can connect directly to these services without needing the JEE
web developer in the middle. Through AJAX presentational libraries like Dojo
and AJAX data interaction libraries like Ubiquity XForms,
the client is smart enough to drive not just simple user interfaces, but data validation, conditional user interface presentation,
and access to web services throughout the end-user fill experience. It is even smart enough to offer webtop design and
deployment experiences for these applications.

In this regard, I would like to draw your attention to the most exciting product addition in the
new Lotus Forms 3.5 release. The new product,
Lotus Forms Turbo, provides non-technical users with a web experience for the
design and deployment of data collection forms and reporting functions.
To get an idea of how the non-technical user is enabled, see the new
YouTube videos on Lotus Forms Turbo.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, these videos are priceless, so I'll stop writing because when you see, you'll know!