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The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

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Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#11

Post by SquareWheel »

anon1m0us wrote: post #8
th0ma5 wrote: post #2

I was hoping for a little more detail around the beginnings of AJAX. I know it was added to IE to support Outlook in IE but I thought Maps was the first big use of it outside of Outlook.

Whenever people talk about how IE ruined the internet, I think about AJAX. I actually thought IE was great for the web. A poignant example I remember was, if you got a /TR /TD out of order, Netscape wouldn't show the web page at all. It'd work fine in IE though. IE just made it so much easier to move fast in web development. People blast IE, but I really don't think the web would be as good as it is today without it.…

AJAX is the one feature people can point to as something good that came from Internet Explorer. That and maybe their take on the box model. But virtually everything else they got wrong. Worse yet, they got complacent with their lead and web development stalled for years as a result.

Other browsers have done far more to get us to where we are.

Chrome introduced a modern security model and many useful APIs and protocols (including HTTP/2). Firefox popularized the concept of browser extensions and developer tools like Firebug. Safari made much possible by opening WebKit, such as Chrome and mobile browsers. Opera invented half of the original browser concepts including tabbed browsing.

AJAX was largely responsible for the initial push to modern, dynamic websites, but it doesn't score enough points to make Microsoft the good guy in this history.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#12

Post by ejdyksen »

mongol wrote: post #7

Does anyone remember Microsoft Terraserver? An extremely slow mapping solution that predates Google maps.

I do! I remember showing everyone in the family black and white satellite images of our neighborhood.

I seem to recall it was the first place any of us had seen satellite images outside of movies or CNN, and certainly the first place we had seen images of where we lived.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#14

Post by noodle »

Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote: post #9
th0ma5 wrote: post #2

I was hoping for a little more detail around the beginnings of AJAX. I know it was added to IE to support Outlook in IE but I thought Maps was the first big use of it outside of Outlook.

AJAX's origins are actually really cool. It started before XmlHttpRequest. If I recall correctly, when the user took an action that required a server response, the javascript would make a 1px by 1px iframe and load it to a specific URL with the important information in the query parameters. The response would look something like this someGlobalFunction({ searchResults: [ {"name": "Joseph Paul"}, {"name": "Joe McCray"…

XML Data Islands were also an early version of XHR that MS introduced in the late 90s. It allowed you to load XML sort of like an image, and then hook into the loading events .

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#15

Post by smarterclayton »

Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote: post #9
th0ma5 wrote: post #2

I was hoping for a little more detail around the beginnings of AJAX. I know it was added to IE to support Outlook in IE but I thought Maps was the first big use of it outside of Outlook.

AJAX's origins are actually really cool. It started before XmlHttpRequest. If I recall correctly, when the user took an action that required a server response, the javascript would make a 1px by 1px iframe and load it to a specific URL with the important information in the query parameters. The response would look something like this someGlobalFunction({ searchResults: [ {"name": "Joseph Paul"}, {"name": "Joe McCray"…

A lot of early web apps heavily abused this pattern - I worked on a web framework that used iframes to manage widget state, and of course at that time everyone had to support IE5 and 6. But those browsers by default had this charming noise (an audible click) every time a page loaded or iframe loaded. When you would click a widget button you’d here this curious storm of clicks as the iframes all reloaded.

That culminated in a super awesome bug called “The Click of Death” where sometimes on IE6 you’d click an interface element, hear a huge train of clicks, and then ominously, it would fall silent and IE would freeze (hard lockup, no browser interaction possible).

Turns out we were deadlocking on CSS and JS loads in those iframes - IE6 only allowed two simultaneous connections, and if you got out of order you couldn’t load an iframe because the connections were waiting to clear the CSS item the JS needed to load.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#17

Post by jasonkester »

th0ma5 wrote: post #2

I was hoping for a little more detail around the beginnings of AJAX. I know it was added to IE to support Outlook in IE but I thought Maps was the first big use of it outside of Outlook.

Nah, the idea of realtime communication between browser and server is as old as javascript. I implemented my first version in 1997, using hidden iframes loading scripts, but I don't imagine I was the first to do so.

Relevant to the article, I actually also implemented a draggable map that loaded tiles dynamically on demand for a little failed outdoor startup in 1998. The limiting factor back then was actually the server. You just couldn't store enough tiles on the drives of the day, or generate them fast enough from gis with the machines available.

The thing would work nicely, so long as there was only one person using it. ...which isn't really the sort of scale one would wish for in a web app.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#19

Post by greggman2 »

harryh wrote: post #3
th0ma5 wrote: post #2

I was hoping for a little more detail around the beginnings of AJAX. I know it was added to IE to support Outlook in IE but I thought Maps was the first big use of it outside of Outlook.

GMail was a heavy AJAX user and predated Google Maps.

Oddpost predates GMail and was heavy AJAX. Was bought by Yahoo to become Yahoo mail

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#20

Post by zuhayeer »

'But Larry Page and Google were not interested in application software. “We like the web,” he is said to have told Lars Rasmussen, one of the Gordon’s fellow co-founders. And he set the team a deadline to get their idea working in a web browser.'

Building for web still underrated

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