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The part that's more interesting to me is the "UI/Java" part. It's very hard to think of any consumer web company from that era that iterated on a UI quickly w

by chubot 5y ago

The part that's more interesting to me is the "UI/Java" part. It's very hard to think of any consumer web company from that era that iterated on a UI quickly with Java and hit exponential growth. Here is a list of YC startups, and you have to scroll down before you hit anything but Ruby/Python (and C++ for back ends, presumably Go too). But I'd say this is true of all web companies in general, not just YC companies. (You'd probably see more PHP in non-YC companies, and I'd argue it's still more appropriate than Java for this use case) https://charliereese.ca/article/top-50-y-combinator-tech-startups https://charliereese.ca/article/top-50-y-combinator-tech-sta... Aside from the outliers that were GMail and Maps (acquisition), Google had a lot of trouble producing good UIs. Google+ was a good example of UI well below the state of the art at the time. Notably YouTube was a huge Python codebase ... which Google was already using at the time, but not much for web front ends.

zorr 5y ago
This email seems to be about 6 months before they released GWT 1.0. Their toolkit to compile Java to JS for web UI's. They likely already used it internally by then. If I remember correctly at the time they also used lots of Java on the backend.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
I suspect what you're seeing is a bit of "I've got a hammer and everything looks like a nail" in relation to the fancy shiny GWT thing that some teams at Google built at the time. IMHO GWT was an awful toolkit and had a slow and terrible development cycle, but there was a lot of hype about it back then as if it was solving the bridge between dynamic front ends and backends written in Java. I wasn't even at Google at the time but had management types trying to foist it on me at a company I worked at, and it was frankly a failure. I'm not sure if Google Video was done in GWT, but it certainly had the look of a GWT product. When I came to Google in 2012 there were still some products using it but it was mostly recognized for being clunky and those products have been migrated.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Pretty sure it was GWT. I joined in 2009 when they were in the midst of the rewrite.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- w0mbat 5y ago
  It was not GWT. I worked on it from 2004 (months before launch) to the first couple of years as a live service. It was Java servlets, generating HTML and JavaScript, using some kind of templating system that was in place when I started, taking over from the previous front-end guy. There was no translating Java to Javascript, which is GWT's thing. In fact there was not that much Javascript involved in the early site, it was generated HTML with a smattering of JavaScript. The goal initially was to look like Google search as much as possible and capitalize on the users familiarity with that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
nostrademons 5y ago
Interestingly the first version of Google Search's frontend was written in Python, based off the Medusa framework. It was replaced by a heavily-optimized C webserver (GWS) written by Craig Silverstein in 1999. The Python -> C rewrite took the frontend server fleet from 30 machines down to 3, and it would've fit on 1 but they needed fault tolerance. There continued (and continues) to be a large prejudice against Python for large-scale software projects at Google, even among people who were core members of the Python Software Foundation! I think this is a good example of peoples' mental models of the world ossifying and not understanding how economics have changed. Python continues to be 30x or more slower than C - but it doesn't matter. Computing has gotten so cheap that you just eat the cost, build your product anyways, and then figure out how to optimize after you sell to Google.

by chubot 5y ago

zorr 5y ago

This email seems to be about 6 months before they released GWT 1.0. Their toolkit to compile Java to JS for web UI's. They likely already used it internally by then. If I remember correctly at the time they also used lots of Java on the backend.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

I suspect what you're seeing is a bit of "I've got a hammer and everything looks like a nail" in relation to the fancy shiny GWT thing that some teams at Google built at the time. IMHO GWT was an awful toolkit and had a slow and terrible development cycle, but there was a lot of hype about it back then as if it was solving the bridge between dynamic front ends and backends written in Java. I wasn't even at Google at the time but had management types trying to foist it on me at a company I worked at, and it was frankly a failure. I'm not sure if Google Video was done in GWT, but it certainly had the look of a GWT product. When I came to Google in 2012 there were still some products using it but it was mostly recognized for being clunky and those products have been migrated.

nostrademons 5y ago
Pretty sure it was GWT. I joined in 2009 when they were in the midst of the rewrite.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
w0mbat 5y ago
It was not GWT. I worked on it from 2004 (months before launch) to the first couple of years as a live service. It was Java servlets, generating HTML and JavaScript, using some kind of templating system that was in place when I started, taking over from the previous front-end guy. There was no translating Java to Javascript, which is GWT's thing. In fact there was not that much Javascript involved in the early site, it was generated HTML with a smattering of JavaScript. The goal initially was to look like Google search as much as possible and capitalize on the users familiarity with that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

nostrademons 5y ago

Interestingly the first version of Google Search's frontend was written in Python, based off the Medusa framework. It was replaced by a heavily-optimized C webserver (GWS) written by Craig Silverstein in 1999. The Python -> C rewrite took the frontend server fleet from 30 machines down to 3, and it would've fit on 1 but they needed fault tolerance. There continued (and continues) to be a large prejudice against Python for large-scale software projects at Google, even among people who were core members of the Python Software Foundation! I think this is a good example of peoples' mental models of the world ossifying and not understanding how economics have changed. Python continues to be 30x or more slower than C - but it doesn't matter. Computing has gotten so cheap that you just eat the cost, build your product anyways, and then figure out how to optimize after you sell to Google.