Bosworth On Why AJAX Failed, Then Succeeded 265
An anonymous reader writes "eWeek has a story describing a talk by former Microsoft developer Adam Bosworth, now a VP at Google, entitled 'Physics, Speed and Psychology: What Works and What Doesn't in Software, and Why.' Bosworth depicts issues with processing, broadband, natural language, and human behavior; and he dishes on Microsoft." Quoting: "'Back in '96-'97, me and a group of people... helped build stuff that these days is called AJAX,' Bosworth said. 'We sat down and took a hard look at what was going to happen with the Internet and we concluded, in the face of unyielding opposition and animosity from virtually every senior person at Microsoft, that the thick client was on its way out and it was going to be replaced by browser-based apps. Saying this at Microsoft back in '96 was roughly equivalent to wandering around in a fire wearing matches,' he said. 'But we concluded we should go and build this thing. And we put all this stuff together so people could build thin-client applications... Now you hear about AJAX all the time, but this was built in '97,' Bosworth said. Yet, AJAX failed for a variety of reasons, including some 'big mistakes.'"
Re:i hear... (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft was also the first to support the
Re:i hear... (Score:4, Informative)
I guess there's a joke here somewhere about Google having to steal talent from Microsoft, given that Microsoft is usually accused of the same thing.
Re:i hear... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Me too. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:...has yet to succeed... (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XForms/Calculator [wikibooks.org]
I can't wait!
Re:i hear... (Score:2, Informative)
The story of XmlHttp (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm [alexhopmann.com]
The work to create what became known as XmlHTTP was done by folks in the Outlook Web Access, and it was a gradual development, it did not come in the form of a spec by a third party group, but some brainstorming and mixed ideas as those developers were trying to build OWA (they were using clever post backs at the time), he describes it as: The guy that implemented the feature joined Microsoft in 1997, and would not start working on it until 1998 and the work did not start until 1998 (he said "probably in late 1998"). In fact, according to that history, they had to scramble to get the feature into IE5 (finally released in March 1999): Which is at odds with Bosworth's claim that they helped invent AJAX in 96-97.
Like many people at the time, the idea of calling code on the server was around, Netscape even shipped in 1997 shipped a browser that contained an IIOP client (IIOP is a binary protocol, part of CORBA) that allowed the browser to communicate with IIOP servers on the other end:
http://cgi.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease389
At the time Netscape was touting the benefits of using this new API as a way of building rich applications. So the idea predated Microsoft and Bosworth, but never got mass adoption.
So who came up with the idea first is hard to tell. But it seems obvious that Ajax did not originate within Bosworth's own team in the 96-97 time frame, but in another team: the Exchange group in late 1998 to 1999.
As they say, "Success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan."
Iframe deprecated? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The story of XmlHttp (Score:2, Informative)
I'll be writing more notes on this at http://www.alexhopmann.com/ [alexhopmann.com]