Bosworth On Why AJAX Failed, Then Succeeded

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek has a story describing a talk by former Microsoft developer Adam Bosworth, now a VP at Google, entitled 'Physics, Speed and Psychology: What Works and What Doesn't in Software, and Why.' Bosworth depicts issues with processing, broadband, natural language, and human behavior; and he dishes on Microsoft." Quoting: "'Back in '96-'97, me and a group of people... helped build stuff that these days is called AJAX,' Bosworth said. 'We sat down and took a hard look at what was going to happen with the Internet and we concluded, in the face of unyielding opposition and animosity from virtually every senior person at Microsoft, that the thick client was on its way out and it was going to be replaced by browser-based apps. Saying this at Microsoft back in '96 was roughly equivalent to wandering around in a fire wearing matches,' he said. 'But we concluded we should go and build this thing. And we put all this stuff together so people could build thin-client applications... Now you hear about AJAX all the time, but this was built in '97,' Bosworth said. Yet, AJAX failed for a variety of reasons, including some 'big mistakes.'"

Comments

Re:i hear...

[Kalriath]

Actually, strangely, he speaks truth. Since V4 or V5 or something of Internet Explorer, the Microsoft.XMLHTTP object shipped with the browser. Before that, it was a free download. This is the core of what XMLHTTP is based on - confusingly enough (and perhaps frighteningly) Microsoft was the first to implement XMLHttpRequest in their browser. Unfortunately, it was ActiveX based. But it did get the other browser makers thinking "how about..." which is something that I can only consider to be a Good Thing for us developers and users.

Microsoft was also the first to support the .selectSingleNode and .selectNodes functions of the XMLDocument object. Thankfully Mozilla, Opera and the KHTML team picked up on that pretty fast.