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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. The seamless "scrolling a map in a browser thing" blew everyone's mind. It did a lot in cementing the image of Google as a visionary company.

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Oh yeah. I remember when Google Maps first came out. Nobody thought that this degree of interactivity was even feasible in a browser. It was really revolutionary.

revolutionary ...

The emergence and craze of AJAX blew everyone away after that point. People realized there was a thing called XMLHTTPrequest. That technology had been my dream ever since I learned HTML. The tech came out in 1996 by Microsoft and nobody used it until 2003.

At this time, Firefox took the torch of keeping the web moving forward. So a whole buzz around web tech reignited.

Those were my days of inspiration.

"Nobody used it" because until the early '00s bandwidth was so precious, and latency so huge, that making multiple HTTP calls was insane in most target markets (US/EU). So you would try to cram everything you could in one big request and push it out. JS was also very immature (both as a language and browser runtime, with differing DOM support etc), and computers could hang if your code was too expensive.

When DSL, cable and fiber started becoming commonplace, computers got faster and browsers started shipping compatible and optimized runtimes, then advanced techniques became really accessible. Eventually jQuery came out, making all browsers work the same, and the rest is history.

Ironically, though, the original Google Maps didn't actually use XMLHTTPRequest, at least not for the trackable maps— that was all just moving <img> tags around and changing the src attributes on them.

XHR may have been used to fetch search results, although it later switched to a JSONP interface with generated script tags so that the various APIs (geocoding, directions, etc) could be used by third party sites on other domains.

Ironically, neither Google Maps nor Google Mail (GMail) used AJAX/XMLHTTPRequest in their first version. The first Google product that used AJAX came later, it was Google Instant Search (search box improvement). Google Maps and GMAIL used hidden iframes to load data in the background. Around 2004/5 only Internet Explorer 5+ and very recent Mozilla builds supported XMLHTTPRequest (without bugs). As far as I remember Maps and GMail switched to AJAX approach around 2006.

Indeed hidden iframes were the original way in which these effects were implemented.

I used Java to accomplish the same thing as AJAX, back in 1996-97 or so. I embedded a hidden (1-pixel, transparent) applet that opened a TCP socket to a server.

The major browsers all allowed applets to expose methods to JavaScript, so I provided a simple API that the page used to send requests and receive responses, which the applet multiplexed on the same connection.

I also used it to receive notifications from the server; the system I built was a teleconferencing system, and so while a call was going on, the server continually sent status messages about parties entering or exiting the call, and flags about which party was speaking (based on audio monitoring). Requests were used for commands like disconnecting or muting.

It was pretty solid once we figured out how to make applet instantiation resilient (the browser/applet interface wasn't very stable). In fact, it was better than XMLHttpRequest, because it was just one, compact, long-running TCP stream; it was pretty much a websocket, before there were websockets.

You're probably off by a few years there and, of course, Microsoft used it for their browser-based Outlook client. One could write a similarly wrong-headed article about how Microsoft invented Gmail.

Interestingly enough, the technique was used pretty heavily in a web-based BI software product that I wrote back in 1999. The UI was designed to be responsive and interactive, and I had to 'invent' a lot of the AJAX-type features and techniques that were later well-known. The problem was that most software back then (including this product) were 'enterprise software', limiting diffusion of ideas.

> The tech came out in 1996 by Microsoft and nobody used it until 2003.

Not really.

Ever since there iframes things like that could be implemented. People just didn't care...

I remember that back around 2003 I was making a highly interactive site that used iframes in a similar way - the parent page set the URL, the child one called window.parent.something() to pass data back.

I actually had no idea that I was on the cutting edge in this one-page app world at the time, I was just noodling around at university. But it was a lot of fun.

do you remember all those too-cool-for-school types who kept whining about the AJAX acronym and how it was overhyped and BLAH BLAH BLAH

BTW: MICROSOFT invented Ajax. Really! See Garret Smith on this topic.

http://garrettsmith.net/blog/archives/2006/01/microsoft_inve...

They didn't know what they had...

Yup. And originally done with a 1 pixel iframe rather than the XMLHttpRequest method if I remember correctly.

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