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Video Script
Welcome back, everyone. Now let’s continue our discussion on interactive web technologies. So we’ve done a little bit of JavaScript so far to get our Tic Tac Toe game working. But there are a lot of other technologies out there that really make web 2.0 really work. So in concert with JavaScript, we have Ajax Ajax was released in 2005. And it allowed for a synchronous JavaScript. So really what happens with Ajax is once the web page loads, the JavaScript can run on the webpage. But what if you wanted more data from your web server? Well, typically, what would end up happening is that you would have to have the page refreshed in its entirety in order to get that web request fulfilled. But Ajax allows you to send information back and forth to your web server behind the scenes without having to have the whole entire page reload. This isn’t really useful, because we can have the entire page get loaded once, especially if it’s a really large, complicated page. And then your JavaScript can handle sending requests back and forth to your web server to reload certain things. Like for example, new comments that were on the page, a new likes, or even maybe a new reply to a Reddit thread, this drastically decreases the amount of time you spend browsing the web page by having to wait for the entire page to reload, just to see who the latest comment was on your post. Now, in this case, this also applies with XML, which we’ll talk about here in a little bit. Now, most Ajax anymore will actually heavily favor using JSON, which we’ll also talk about here in a little bit. But let’s take a look at XML first. xml stands for the Extensible Markup Language, oh, what really XML is, is kind of looks like HTML.
So HTML works off of a series of tags, just like what XML works off of within this particular set of XML data, we have our person all the way up here at the top, our person is the top level object or top level tag here, and a person has certain attributes for them. So this particular person, as a first name of john, and a last name of Smith, in age of 25, it also has an address, and this address has different elements about it. So this address has a city postal code, state street address, and so on. And so notice each bit of information has a tag that describes it, and a closing tag, that opening closing tag nerves, the actual information, and the tag name itself describes that information. So this is a pretty useful way of sending information, especially in the early days, the internet. And a lot of other applet types of applications actually use XML to send information like this as well. json works in a very similar manner. json or JavaScript Object Notation has a series of keys and values, these keys indicate the actual description of the data. And the value is the of course, the actual data itself. So we have this exact same sort of object that we had from last time from the XML. But instead of having a top level type of person, now we have a JSON object. JSON objects are denoted using a set of curly brackets. And inside here are our each of our particular elements. So we have a first name element. And then that first name has a value of john, the same thing with last name, age. And so you can kind of notice we’re mixing data types.
So here, we have strings, and here we have an int. Now, to denote sub objects, we have a address which value is a JSON object. So we can nest JSON objects inside of JSON objects, which helps denote relationships between attributes or between elements just like what we had with our XML, which had nested tags and other things here, we can also have a list. So we here with this person has multiple phone numbers. So we have a list of JSON objects here, which also have elements inside of it with data associated with it. And so a lot of what JavaScript actually works with most things that have multiple pieces of information about it, like a person or maybe a car, or whatever it may be, typically is represented as a JSON object. Now, many other languages use this sort of syntax for a lot of different things, for example, and Python. When we cover dictionaries and Python, you’ll actually notice that the sentence Tax and representation in Python for dictionaries is very, very similar to how JSON objects are actually represented. They work very similar. But there’s a lot of different technologies out there in the web, especially the web 2.0, with the sheer amount of different websites and the variety that we actually have, there’s a lot of different technologies that are actually running those behind the scenes. Much of the core of that, of course, is HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, especially with JavaScript, though there are a lot of different frameworks that are being used out there that have all sorts of different functionalities.
This functionality varies between libraries that allow you to, let’s say, graphic data, right. So make charts or these complete different frameworks that change the actual structure of your web page, like react view, or Angular JS, which are all JavaScript frameworks that are used to design more dynamic web pages using templates, a lot of what react view and angular do mixes a lot of what JavaScript and Ajax tried to accomplish. So you’re only sending the smallest amount of data or refreshing the smallest amount of the webpage at any given time. And you’re dynamically generating a lot of that content instead of statically, creating it. Or you also have things like SAS or SAS, which is a better way of organizing and structuring structuring your CSS. So there’s a lot of different packages, frameworks and libraries out there that we can use, make very beautiful dynamic webpages. And depending on your use case, there’s probably a library out there that will help you and help you either improve your code, or make your project better. These are just some of the current popular technologies that are being used right now. But Lastly, I kinda want to conclude our talk on web 2.0, because this is the last major web module or internet module that we have for this course. Now, as we mentioned, right web one point O is very static web 2.0 is very dynamic. And we’ve been kind of repeating this throughout these modules. But it’s not just about the technology.
But Web 2.0 has really enabled us as a society to interact and relate in an entirely different way than we’ve ever been able to before in the past. And even now, even then, past 10 years, web 2.0 has grown, especially in regards to things like social media, social media has significantly taken off compared to 10-15 years ago when it was just in its infancy stages. And so as you work around on the internet, try to think about, or reflect about how the switch and web technologies and the advancements of web technologies has really impacted you on how you actually work in your daily life, how you interact with your friends and family. But the last thing I want to close with is the machine is us/ing us, which is a video made by one of K-State’s professors, Dr. Michael Wesch, who works in the anthropology department, but I’ll link that video up for you to watch.