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Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

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Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#41

Post by Red_Curry »

corresation wrote: post #31
hna0002 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 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!

This 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.

And 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.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#42

Post by hna0002 »

corresation wrote: post #31
hna0002 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 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!

This 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.

Ok, 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.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#43

Post by pilif »

slinkyavenger wrote: post #15
corresation wrote: post #10

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…

The only HTTP suite that comes to mind is Indy, or WinShoes back then

ICS was around in 99. I've used it in 98 or even 97 for some fun projects.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#44

Post by alexhop »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #28

I love getting history like this. I'll add to the question if any Microsoftians are around: who decided to call it XMLHttpRequest?

I did (Alex Hopmann). The easiest way to ship it in IE5 at that relatively late stage (right before IE5b2) was to put it in msxml.dll so we had to put the XML twist on it for that to make sense.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#45

Post by ExpiredLink »

BTW, XMLHttpRequest was a big mistake with significant consequences from Microsoft's point of view. It opened the door to Web applications an ended the age of desktop applications and thereby Microsoft's dominance. If MS managers had understood the technology they would have never let it escape into the IT world. Without IE's accidental support other browsers (Netscape, Firefox) would have been unable to establish the technology.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#46

Post by jtheory »

bdowney wrote: post #27
account_taken wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow everybody serious on ycombinator. Can't even make a joke about Al Gore anymore.

That's because that joke stopped being funny 10 years ago.

Worse: it's been more than fourteen years since Gore's original awkward wording, and surely the jokes about it weren't funny for 4+ years.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#47

Post by jeffbarr »

kragen wrote: post #34
Arjuna wrote: post #5

It would be remiss to not mention Shawn Bracewell in the discussion. According to Alex Hopmann, Shawn was responsible for adding asynchronous support: "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…

Sounds like Shawn Bracewell is the person to really credit — non-asynchronous XHR is unusable, and unused. Jim's remarks here are a little over the top. At KnowNow in 2000 we were asynchronously getting data from the server and preserving document state on the client by implementing Comet in in Netscape 4 (and IE 4), by using a frameset with zero-height frames. These days long-polling frames that finish loading when…

Ah, the memories. I wrote the first non-KnowNow client for this data stream, at their request. For some odd reason best left buried in the sands of time, they wanted me to do it in VB6.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#48

Post by jtheory »

flomo wrote: post #39
corresation wrote: post #10

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…

There 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/

I 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.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#49

Post by kybernetikos »

kragen wrote: post #34
Arjuna wrote: post #5

It would be remiss to not mention Shawn Bracewell in the discussion. According to Alex Hopmann, Shawn was responsible for adding asynchronous support: "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…

Sounds like Shawn Bracewell is the person to really credit — non-asynchronous XHR is unusable, and unused. Jim's remarks here are a little over the top. At KnowNow in 2000 we were asynchronously getting data from the server and preserving document state on the client by implementing Comet in in Netscape 4 (and IE 4), by using a frameset with zero-height frames. These days long-polling frames that finish loading when…

A comet server I work with still supports foreverframe for browsers without websockets or multipart-replace because for fast updating data, it's actually much more performant than long polling.

Re: Ask HN: Who built XMLHttpRequest at Microsoft in 1999?

#50

Post by derefr »

kragen wrote: post #34
Arjuna wrote: post #5

It would be remiss to not mention Shawn Bracewell in the discussion. According to Alex Hopmann, Shawn was responsible for adding asynchronous support: "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…

Sounds like Shawn Bracewell is the person to really credit — non-asynchronous XHR is unusable, and unused. Jim's remarks here are a little over the top. At KnowNow in 2000 we were asynchronously getting data from the server and preserving document state on the client by implementing Comet in in Netscape 4 (and IE 4), by using a frameset with zero-height frames. These days long-polling frames that finish loading when…

> non-asynchronous XHR is unusable, and unused.

I wouldn't say this at all. We could have gone in a completely different direction with Javascript, even back then: spawning numerous lightweight processes running userspace code which then sit in a blocking "receive" state whenever they want to wait for the result of an XHR. In other words, Javascript could have been Erlang for the browser, instead of the odd OS7-like cooperative-multitasking abomination we have now.

(What we did get are Web Workers, which are full OS threads you can't even message if they're doing something synchronous. What's even the point of these?)

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