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The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

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Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#41

Post by anon1m0us »

shantly wrote: post #27
anon1m0us wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 has been bad for the web. Letting Javascript make requests without explicit user action & vetting of whatever it's sending is basically the reason the web's so messed up and user-hostile.

all this could be done without AJAX. Just loading a javascript file would enable this.

Prior to AJAX, sending info was done by loading a "transparent.gif?value1=x&value2=y&value3=z"

It's not technology that has ruined the web. It's greed.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#43

Post by sk5t »

reaperducer wrote: post #40
sk5t wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The limiting factor back then was actually the server. Do you still feel confident that the server was an unsolvable limit? Like, the expectations for map resolution were not all that lofty in 1997, and it's still today pretty common to precompute tiles at different ranges/scales.

Sounds like a capacity issue. How many tiles can you store on a hard drive with a maximum capacity of about 6GB? Especially at 1997 prices.

6GB doesn't sound untenable if one were to store map/graph data in some optimized text or vector form, rasterizing tiles as needed with a cache mixed in. Maybe keep the 20-mile tiles hot all the time... I guess this depends on the geography covered and use case though.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#44

Post by shantly »

anon1m0us wrote: post #41
shantly wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AJAX has been bad for the web. Letting Javascript make requests without explicit user action & vetting of whatever it's sending is basically the reason the web's so messed up and user-hostile.

all this could be done without AJAX. Just loading a javascript file would enable this. Prior to AJAX, sending info was done by loading a "transparent.gif?value1=x&value2=y&value3=z" It's not technology that has ruined the web. It's greed.

Even the earlier methods required JS to be able to trigger requests not explicitly intended by the user. And at least they usually fired up a loading bar at the bottom of the browser, so you could tell shenanigans were happening.

AJAX made that cleaner and broadened its use, but yes, you could already make requests with Javascript that the user didn't want you to or didn't care to make for any purpose of their own.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#45

Post by jraph »

SquareWheel wrote: post #11
anon1m0us wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 protocol…

> Safari made much possible by opening WebKit

Just to give credit where it is due: they had to, since they used KHTML, under LGPL, a pretty good browser engine at the time.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#46

Post by reaperducer »

sk5t wrote: post #43
reaperducer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a capacity issue. How many tiles can you store on a hard drive with a maximum capacity of about 6GB? Especially at 1997 prices.

6GB doesn't sound untenable if one were to store map/graph data in some optimized text or vector form, rasterizing tiles as needed with a cache mixed in. Maybe keep the 20-mile tiles hot all the time... I guess this depends on the geography covered and use case though.

Still, think of the expense. Plus you need at least second for backup. And probably a whole bunch of them in production to handle many users. Think about the web in 1997, before "scalability" was even a word.

Re: The Founding of Google Maps (2015)

#47

Post by jasonkester »

sk5t wrote: post #35
jasonkester wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ser…

> The limiting factor back then was actually the server. Do you still feel confident that the server was an unsolvable limit? Like, the expectations for map resolution were not all that lofty in 1997, and it's still today pretty common to precompute tiles at different ranges/scales.

Our tiles were essentially USGS topo maps, generated by GIS on the backend. This pre-dates even IE's first vector stuff, so the only way to deliver things like this was images (with transparent .gif overlays for things like our trails and markers).

The only two options available were pre-computing and storing, or generating on the fly. Drives were nowhere near big enough to store enough precomputed tiles to be useful. Machines weren't cheap enough to buy the sort of computing power (on our budget) to generate on the fly, since a handful of users could peg a machine.

We might have been able to write our own fast, stripped down, GIS renderer to get costs down a bit. Instead, we took the 90s option of burning through our VC as quickly as possible and hitting the ground hard.

It was a fun time.

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