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All I can find is it was built for Outlook Web Access. Nothing more. No names, no nothing.
Who's idea was it, and who built it?
Anyone know?
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/123475/who-first-created-or-popularized-the-original-xmlhttprequest-msxml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
Edit: I recall seeing Bosworth's auction demo in late '97 or early '98. This predates Hopmann's timeline. Perhaps my memory is faulty.
It was Adam Bosworth's idea. People on Adam's team built it. Edit: I recall seeing Bosworth's auction demo in late '97 or early '98. This predates Hopmann's timeline. Perhaps my memory is faulty.
Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to do the first major app that tied it together (Outlook Web Access). Without the earlier contributions of the Trident/IE teams, it wouldn't have been possible, and its absolutely true that Adam and many folks he worked with had the conceptual vision for tying it together (he called it weblications at the time).
Note to OP: this blog was reference 6 in the Wikipedia article you linked to.
It was Adam Bosworth's idea. People on Adam's team built it. Edit: I recall seeing Bosworth's auction demo in late '97 or early '98. This predates Hopmann's timeline. Perhaps my memory is faulty.
Slightly different story at http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm with an update regarding Bosworth: Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to…
"Step one was to bring the code up to production quality so we got Shawn Bracewell, one of the devs on the OWA team to take it over. Being a smart guy he promptly threw away all of my code and rewrote it in a more solid fashion, adding async support, error handling and more." [1]
[1] http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm
In addition, Jim Van Eaton wrote:
"XMLHTTP was born and implemented by the OWA dev effort of Shawn Bracewell. Exchange funded the effort by having OWA development build XMLHTTP in partnership with the Webdata team in SQL server.
XMLHTTP changed everything. It put the "D" in DHTML. It allowed us to asynchronously get data from the server and preserve document state on the client." [2]
[2] http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2005/06/21/40664...
It was Adam Bosworth's idea. People on Adam's team built it. Edit: I recall seeing Bosworth's auction demo in late '97 or early '98. This predates Hopmann's timeline. Perhaps my memory is faulty.
Slightly different story at http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm with an update regarding Bosworth: Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to…
It was Adam Bosworth's idea. People on Adam's team built it. Edit: I recall seeing Bosworth's auction demo in late '97 or early '98. This predates Hopmann's timeline. Perhaps my memory is faulty.
Slightly different story at http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm with an update regarding Bosworth: Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slightly different story at http://www.alexhopmann.com/xmlhttp.htm with an update regarding Bosworth: Adam and his team (especially folks like Rod Chavez, Michael Wallent and many others, as usual I'm probably forgetting to mention some of the key people) invented the Dynamic HTML part which was miles beyond what Netscape was doing at the time. I just filled in the XMLHTTP piece, and collaborated with many others to…
I feel that I want to now use the term "weblications".
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.