7 ms·

Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing...hell, it took google writing Gmail (2004) to really show everyone that a large SPA using javascript was even poss

Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing...hell, it took google writing Gmail (2004) to really show everyone that a large SPA using javascript was even possible. After Gmail...things really started to move in the javascript world...people started to put effort into both the runtimes and the libraries.

monocasa 7y ago
And even then, gmail wasn't really written in javascript. They compiled Java down to JavaScript because JS itself was such a pain to deal with natively.
- nogridbag 7y ago
  Do you have a source for this? Google did create a Java to JavaScript compiler/web framework: GWT but as far as I understood this was never used by the Gmail team. In fact, I heard there was pushback against using this on Gmail.
- andykellr 7y ago
  Inbox was definitely written using GWT, as were other major google products, but not gmail as far as I know.
  - cletus 7y ago
    That’s not true. Inbox was written in Angular originally. Not sure what it evolved to but it was always JavaScript.
    - dragonshed 7y ago
      Angular definitely did not catch on for google properties until much much later. Back when I did nothing but backbone/angular consulting, none of the major google properties used angular.
- svachalek 7y ago
  I think most of it was written for the Closure compiler (JS-to-JS), with some bits like chat windows in GWT (Java-to-JS).
  - monocasa 7y ago
    I was under the impression that the closure compiler didn't exist in 2004, only GWT, and that it was rewritten to be almost all JS later.
- cletus 7y ago
  This is factually inaccurate. Gmail is and was always JavaScript. GWT had some successes (eg AdWords). Gmail wasn’t one of them.
steego 7y ago
They really weren't a thing, but they also weren't unheard of. Personally speaking, I started working on a complex JavaScript application (web-based ERP/CRM system) in 2000. While it wasn't an SPA, we designed our pages so you didn't have to leave them to do what you needed to do. For example, a user might stay on one page for a few hours because they're speccing out a project. Updates were often committed live using remote scripting (A precursor to AJAX) and we did a lot of DOM manipulation to update content in-place. At that time, we targeted IE because Netscape's support for DOM manipulation was abysmal. While I have to give Gmail credit where it's due, I have to give Firefox the real credit for doing the hard work and finally releasing an alternative to IE that kicked JavaScript into high gear. If Gmail had never happened, it would have only been a matter of time before SPAs were going to become a thing. There were more of us doing it before Gmail than most people realize.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Should Microsoft get credit for inventing Ajax and having the first real world functioning example of it?
  - steego 7y ago
    They do deserve some credit for intentionally introducing that feature to the browser as a standard feature, but the notion of fetching data without reloading the page wasn't novel at all. That's what Java applets and plugins were for. I'm also pretty sure they weren't the first to fetch data from the server without reloading, because people were doing all sorts of novel things in the mid-90s with plugins. The reason it didn't really take off back then wasn't because of vision. It was because there was so little you could do with JavaScript. The browsers were still implementing the basic features and a lot of page/component manipulation was very broken. Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.
    - stan_rogers 7y ago
      Loading into a hidden or pixel-sized iframe (or ilayer in NS) was a thing before XMLHttpRequest as well. In what would now seem a scary technique, you would use JS to load more JS (plus data, of course) that would put the new data into the iframe's host page.
dylan604 7y ago
It was my impression that Gmail's big hit was its use of AJAX more than just its use of Javascript in general. Until then, it was just this obscure thing MS created, but it wasn't really used in the wild until Gmail.
- steego 7y ago
  It was used, but mostly for internal applications or websites that were willing to dictate a minimum browser. Firefox was only released in 2002. By 2004, it had hit a critical enough mass that it was reasonable to tell a user they needed as good as IE or Firefox at the time (for a beta project).
scarface74 7y ago
Let’s give credit where it’s due. The first large scale use of AJAX was Microsoft using it in Outlook Mail for the web in 2000.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  That wasn't just the first large scale use of it, that's when AJAX was invented.
- carterehsmith 7y ago
  Indeed. Microsoft also exposed all of that HTML/JS engine as COM or whatever component, so it could be used by applications other than browser. I remember using Microsoft Money -- personal accounting software -- and it seemed to be all built on that HTML/JS engine.
  - pavlov 7y ago
    It’s crazy how Microsoft had all the pieces in place in 2001 to own both the Chrome and Electron spaces. Even Apple was shipping IE as their default browser. By investing in cross-platform IE and making it both the best browser and the universal runtime for desktop-quality apps, they could have had “Windows Everywhere”. Instead they did the exact opposite and folded IE into a component of desktop Windows where it received no meaningful investment and lost its once commanding lead. Microsoft’s exclusive focus on their proprietary non-portable APIs was a great blunder.
    - numtel 7y ago
      They had been recently sued for having a monopoly from bundling IE with Windows. The chain of events you describe was in many ways not a choice of Microsoft.
      - pavlov 7y ago
        This is a good point, it’s easy to forget about how closely watched Microsoft was by regulators. But IMO it makes it all the more surprising that Microsoft doubled down on the centralized OS+API+apps leverage combo that had brought upon them the antitrust scrutiny, instead of dispersing their influence?
lowercased 7y ago
I seem to remember oddpost.com doing 'Ajax email' pretty significantly in 2002/2003, well before gmail.
unreal37 7y ago
"Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing" I don't know what you were doing in 1995 and 1996, but I was building Javascript apps. They were "a thing" for me at least.
asiachick 7y ago
Please don't repeat this non-fact. There were plenty of large SPAs before GMail. Oddpost existed 2 years before Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost It also felt more like an app than gmail ever has given it had the "standard" 3 panel look of most desktop email apps (same as most of them do today like Thunderbird/Outlook/Apple's Mail) And before that Outlook had a browser version that acted like a SPA since 1997. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web In fact I'm pretty sure that's why Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History
- chc 7y ago
  I don't think many people knew about Oddpost, whatever it was, so it seems a bit suspect to say it influenced a lot of developers' perceptions of JavaScript.
  - lowercased 7y ago
    As someone who was doing web development at that time (since '96 actually), oddpost did have an impact on perception of JS and what was possible among developers. Yahoo buying them was kind of a big deal at the time, and every developer I knew who was involved in web stuff had seen it or at least heard about it. The biggest drawback at the time was that it was window/IE only, and when gmail was released, google made an effort to be cross-platform. IMO, Google's 'big win' wasn't so much showing what JS could do, but that complex JS could be done cross-browser and cross-platform.
    - trustfundbaby 7y ago
      Never heard of oddpost, and pretty sure most devs at the time had never either. I do remember Gmail really being a wow moment with respect to Javascript and specifically AJAX though.
      - hamburglar 7y ago
swiley 7y ago
Gmail is a great example of everything that sucks about web applications. Poor information density, crap sliding around underneath your mouse everytime you go to click, GUI changing every month, ambiguous pictograms everywhere. Maybe users like native applications because native app programming sucks and it weeds out people who carelessly build things like that.
bfung 7y ago
It wasn't gmail -- it was google maps that really made everyone look again at javascript. Although MS added XMLHTTPRequest, it took something like google maps that pushed it further than anyone thought at the time to make JS a real thing.
- thedance 7y ago
  Yeah, gmail was different than other webmail products but its innovation was really on the backend, giving everyone 1000x more quota than Yahoo was giving them. On the other hand the google maps frontend was what really sold it. Up to then you were getting a full page load every time you panned or zoomed mapquest or yahoo maps. Gmail did not eradicate yahoo mail or hotmail. Google maps promptly eradicated mapquest.
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  agreed- maps was the real game changer. gmail was just okay
blahyawnblah 7y ago
Outlook was the first true web 2.0 (or SPA) website. It's what XHR was built for.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
Gmail was user friendly, but that's it. I think the v8-runtime changed a lot for Javascript, although it was already normal to use then

monocasa 7y ago

And even then, gmail wasn't really written in javascript. They compiled Java down to JavaScript because JS itself was such a pain to deal with natively.

nogridbag 7y ago
Do you have a source for this? Google did create a Java to JavaScript compiler/web framework: GWT but as far as I understood this was never used by the Gmail team. In fact, I heard there was pushback against using this on Gmail.
andykellr 7y ago
Inbox was definitely written using GWT, as were other major google products, but not gmail as far as I know.
- cletus 7y ago
  That’s not true. Inbox was written in Angular originally. Not sure what it evolved to but it was always JavaScript.
  - dragonshed 7y ago
    Angular definitely did not catch on for google properties until much much later. Back when I did nothing but backbone/angular consulting, none of the major google properties used angular.
svachalek 7y ago
I think most of it was written for the Closure compiler (JS-to-JS), with some bits like chat windows in GWT (Java-to-JS).
- monocasa 7y ago
  I was under the impression that the closure compiler didn't exist in 2004, only GWT, and that it was rewritten to be almost all JS later.
cletus 7y ago
This is factually inaccurate. Gmail is and was always JavaScript. GWT had some successes (eg AdWords). Gmail wasn’t one of them.

steego 7y ago

They really weren't a thing, but they also weren't unheard of. Personally speaking, I started working on a complex JavaScript application (web-based ERP/CRM system) in 2000. While it wasn't an SPA, we designed our pages so you didn't have to leave them to do what you needed to do. For example, a user might stay on one page for a few hours because they're speccing out a project. Updates were often committed live using remote scripting (A precursor to AJAX) and we did a lot of DOM manipulation to update content in-place. At that time, we targeted IE because Netscape's support for DOM manipulation was abysmal. While I have to give Gmail credit where it's due, I have to give Firefox the real credit for doing the hard work and finally releasing an alternative to IE that kicked JavaScript into high gear. If Gmail had never happened, it would have only been a matter of time before SPAs were going to become a thing. There were more of us doing it before Gmail than most people realize.

skinnymuch 7y ago
Should Microsoft get credit for inventing Ajax and having the first real world functioning example of it?
- steego 7y ago
  They do deserve some credit for intentionally introducing that feature to the browser as a standard feature, but the notion of fetching data without reloading the page wasn't novel at all. That's what Java applets and plugins were for. I'm also pretty sure they weren't the first to fetch data from the server without reloading, because people were doing all sorts of novel things in the mid-90s with plugins. The reason it didn't really take off back then wasn't because of vision. It was because there was so little you could do with JavaScript. The browsers were still implementing the basic features and a lot of page/component manipulation was very broken. Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.
  - stan_rogers 7y ago
    Loading into a hidden or pixel-sized iframe (or ilayer in NS) was a thing before XMLHttpRequest as well. In what would now seem a scary technique, you would use JS to load more JS (plus data, of course) that would put the new data into the iframe's host page.

dylan604 7y ago

It was my impression that Gmail's big hit was its use of AJAX more than just its use of Javascript in general. Until then, it was just this obscure thing MS created, but it wasn't really used in the wild until Gmail.

steego 7y ago
It was used, but mostly for internal applications or websites that were willing to dictate a minimum browser. Firefox was only released in 2002. By 2004, it had hit a critical enough mass that it was reasonable to tell a user they needed as good as IE or Firefox at the time (for a beta project).

scarface74 7y ago

Let’s give credit where it’s due. The first large scale use of AJAX was Microsoft using it in Outlook Mail for the web in 2000.

bdcravens 7y ago
That wasn't just the first large scale use of it, that's when AJAX was invented.
carterehsmith 7y ago
Indeed. Microsoft also exposed all of that HTML/JS engine as COM or whatever component, so it could be used by applications other than browser. I remember using Microsoft Money -- personal accounting software -- and it seemed to be all built on that HTML/JS engine.
- pavlov 7y ago
  It’s crazy how Microsoft had all the pieces in place in 2001 to own both the Chrome and Electron spaces. Even Apple was shipping IE as their default browser. By investing in cross-platform IE and making it both the best browser and the universal runtime for desktop-quality apps, they could have had “Windows Everywhere”. Instead they did the exact opposite and folded IE into a component of desktop Windows where it received no meaningful investment and lost its once commanding lead. Microsoft’s exclusive focus on their proprietary non-portable APIs was a great blunder.
  - numtel 7y ago
    They had been recently sued for having a monopoly from bundling IE with Windows. The chain of events you describe was in many ways not a choice of Microsoft.
    - pavlov 7y ago
      This is a good point, it’s easy to forget about how closely watched Microsoft was by regulators. But IMO it makes it all the more surprising that Microsoft doubled down on the centralized OS+API+apps leverage combo that had brought upon them the antitrust scrutiny, instead of dispersing their influence?

lowercased 7y ago

I seem to remember oddpost.com doing 'Ajax email' pretty significantly in 2002/2003, well before gmail.

unreal37 7y ago

"Complex javascript apps just weren't a thing" I don't know what you were doing in 1995 and 1996, but I was building Javascript apps. They were "a thing" for me at least.

asiachick 7y ago

Please don't repeat this non-fact. There were plenty of large SPAs before GMail. Oddpost existed 2 years before Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost It also felt more like an app than gmail ever has given it had the "standard" 3 panel look of most desktop email apps (same as most of them do today like Thunderbird/Outlook/Apple's Mail) And before that Outlook had a browser version that acted like a SPA since 1997. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook_on_the_web In fact I'm pretty sure that's why Microsoft introduced XMLHttpRequest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History

chc 7y ago
I don't think many people knew about Oddpost, whatever it was, so it seems a bit suspect to say it influenced a lot of developers' perceptions of JavaScript.
- lowercased 7y ago
  As someone who was doing web development at that time (since '96 actually), oddpost did have an impact on perception of JS and what was possible among developers. Yahoo buying them was kind of a big deal at the time, and every developer I knew who was involved in web stuff had seen it or at least heard about it. The biggest drawback at the time was that it was window/IE only, and when gmail was released, google made an effort to be cross-platform. IMO, Google's 'big win' wasn't so much showing what JS could do, but that complex JS could be done cross-browser and cross-platform.
  - trustfundbaby 7y ago
    Never heard of oddpost, and pretty sure most devs at the time had never either. I do remember Gmail really being a wow moment with respect to Javascript and specifically AJAX though.
    - hamburglar 7y ago

swiley 7y ago

Gmail is a great example of everything that sucks about web applications. Poor information density, crap sliding around underneath your mouse everytime you go to click, GUI changing every month, ambiguous pictograms everywhere. Maybe users like native applications because native app programming sucks and it weeds out people who carelessly build things like that.

bfung 7y ago

It wasn't gmail -- it was google maps that really made everyone look again at javascript. Although MS added XMLHTTPRequest, it took something like google maps that pushed it further than anyone thought at the time to make JS a real thing.

thedance 7y ago
Yeah, gmail was different than other webmail products but its innovation was really on the backend, giving everyone 1000x more quota than Yahoo was giving them. On the other hand the google maps frontend was what really sold it. Up to then you were getting a full page load every time you panned or zoomed mapquest or yahoo maps. Gmail did not eradicate yahoo mail or hotmail. Google maps promptly eradicated mapquest.
liveoneggs 7y ago
agreed- maps was the real game changer. gmail was just okay

blahyawnblah 7y ago

Outlook was the first true web 2.0 (or SPA) website. It's what XHR was built for.

NicoJuicy 7y ago

Gmail was user friendly, but that's it. I think the v8-runtime changed a lot for Javascript, although it was already normal to use then