4 ms·
Who's idea was it, and who built it? While history generally gets rewritten towards a simplified, single-victor model (e.g. Edison and electricity, Ford and as
by corresation 14y ago
Who's idea was it, and who built it?
While history generally gets rewritten towards a simplified, single-victor model (e.g. Edison and electricity, Ford and assembly lines), there is no simple answer to this because the need for a scripted way to load and consume content was very widespread.
There were a number of solutions at the time. The most prevalent was simply having a hidden iframe (which actually worked quite well, with the biggest downside being a loading event noise it would fire in Internet Explorer). In Internet Explorer you could also take advantage of any Safe-For-Scripting marked ActiveX control (yes, ActiveX was the foundation upon which XmlHttpRequest was possible, adding binary extensibility to the browser), which at the time included a large number of third party tools and libraries for doing calls to web services, and a lot of hand-rolled solutions, pre-XmlHttpRequest.
The problem, of course, is that your users had to have those same components installed which could be an issue.
Which was why it was a great convenience when Microsoft started releasing mostly unnoticed XmlHttp components in the MSXML parser library. It was a fragile, memory-leaking beast, but it had the benefit of starting to be packaged in other Microsoft installs, so it was increasingly likely to exist on your client's PCs.
The TLDR; is that it was inevitable, and it is unfair to the truth to attribute such a progression to one person.
EDIT: To why I know this, at the time '99/'00 we were building a rather innovating web application to monitor and control distributed power generation units across the continent. We used the iframe approach, and then an HTTP component included with a Delphi component suite (name escapes me right now), and were then one of the first beta testers of XmlHttp.
- hna0002 14y agoYeah, dont credit Apple for ipod, iphone or ipad, dont credit Mark Zukerberg for social networking, Bill Gates to bring philanthropy to main stream, a government to find the terrorist of Boston attacks, It was all inevitable!
- corresation 14y agoThis childish, sarcastic style of response is increasingly common on here. That isn't a good thing. If you want to specifically address something I've said, stick to that.
- Red_Curry 14y agoAnd your dismissive ad-hominem style of avoiding rebuttal is also increasingly common on here. That isn't a good thing. Stop avoiding arguments directed against you just because you think you might be wrong.
- hna0002 14y agoOk, relax, I am sorry, I haven't done that much bad karma in life. Here is to point out that, everything is inevitable but we must still give credits to those who has brought it up to us, sometimes in faster way and sometimes bolder ways.
- slinkyavenger 14y agoThe only HTTP suite that comes to mind is Indy, or WinShoes back then
- pilif 14y agoICS was around in 99. I've used it in 98 or even 97 for some fun projects.
- jonny_eh 14y agoJust because an invention appears to be inevitable, it doesn't mean the actual inventor doesn't deserve a ton of credit.
- corresation 14y agoCredit is absolutely due for using the monopoly distribution of Microsoft (that is not a slur, but it is simple truth that such components from other vendors could not have the same impact) to essentially sneak a simple HTTP ActiveX component through in the MSXML library, making such dynamic web tasks simpler. Credit is also due to the people who developed and implemented COM and ActiveX and safe-for-scripting (all heavily maligned), making it possible in the first place.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- corresation 14y agoThe component was developed by the Exchange 2000 team, and was integrated in MSXML as a convenient deployment tactic (the sort of thing that gets you in DOJ troubles) at the very last moment. I have no doubt that Bosworth valued it later, but if we're talking specifically about XmlHttp, it was in many ways snuck in because the Exchange team wanted functionality on the client.
- flomo 14y agoThere were also various java applets which more-or-less did something similar, and had the advantage of being semi-cross-platform. (Microsoft's was called "remote scripting"[1] and was pulled after they lost the Sun lawsuit.) [1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-resc/ http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-resc/
- jtheory 14y agoI remember tinkering with invisible frames, but went pretty quickly to Java applets, which could open sockets (back to the origin server, anyway) and handle plain old HTTP from right within the page. Getting an attractive UI was rough going, but I wasn't much worried about that at the time... An applet could also make JavaScript calls, so it was also possible to pass data back into JavaScript on the page. That was a technology that came from Netscape, but MS copied -- so (strangely enough) there was a Java package included in Microsoft's jview distribution that had "com.netscape.livescript" (something like that) in the name.