Photon has been involved in the evolution of the web from its start through what is now called Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. We advise clients on all aspects of web 2.0 development from the UI, through our graphical designers and information architects, to strategic consulting on how to best use web 2.0 technologies for your company.

We define web 2.0 by three layers:

The first level is that it uses Rich Internet Applications like Ajax, Open Laszlo, Flash, Silver light, etc. This is important because the traditional browser metaphor is gone. Our RIA lab is on the forefront of these technologies and is actively developing new and exciting user interfaces as well as specialized ones for the mobile web 2.0 space.

Secondly, it uses some kind of Service Oriented Architecture like feeds, RSS, web services or mashups through toolkits like OpenLaszlo, IBM QED and WSO2. SOA is used to expose services for other applications in order to create completely new services like a mashup. As an example, with one of our clients we have built a widget framework to display KPI data and have deployed them using RSS.

The third factor is that the social web contains user generated content. Photon has built widgets for social networks like facebook and other user generated content management systems to manage things like user video editing, wikis, and blogs.

We have extensively used open source frameworks like Drupal, Joomla and Alfresco to deploy soup to nuts enterprise web 2.0 architecture for many of our clients. Web 2.0 is considered by many as another web trend but we believe that there is a way to cut through the buzz and actually use it to solve real business problems and Photon has the experience to help you do it.