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0 pointssteego6y ago0 comments

They really weren't a thing, but they also weren't unheard of. Personally speaking, I started working on a complex JavaScript application (web-based ERP/CRM system) in 2000. While it wasn't an SPA, we designed our pages so you didn't have to leave them to do what you needed to do. For example, a user might stay on one page for a few hours because they're speccing out a project.

Updates were often committed live using remote scripting (A precursor to AJAX) and we did a lot of DOM manipulation to update content in-place. At that time, we targeted IE because Netscape's support for DOM manipulation was abysmal.

While I have to give Gmail credit where it's due, I have to give Firefox the real credit for doing the hard work and finally releasing an alternative to IE that kicked JavaScript into high gear. If Gmail had never happened, it would have only been a matter of time before SPAs were going to become a thing. There were more of us doing it before Gmail than most people realize.

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Darkphibre6y ago

Oh my goodness. Flashbacks to an web app I was coding up for Universal Studios Music Group back in '99. It leveraged Visual Basic DCOM components hosted in Microsoft Transaction Server. I took over the UI from a dev that was extremely behind, and in a week threw together a fancy UI with a pop-up menu and some other asynchronous interaction concepts (later AJAX / REST provided the abstractions to make it easy).

That was a fun, well-paid project with lots of (non-exempt) overtime. Then the .com bubble popped.

skinnymuch6y ago

Should Microsoft get credit for inventing Ajax and having the first real world functioning example of it?

steegoOP6y ago

They do deserve some credit for intentionally introducing that feature to the browser as a standard feature, but the notion of fetching data without reloading the page wasn't novel at all.

That's what Java applets and plugins were for.

I'm also pretty sure they weren't the first to fetch data from the server without reloading, because people were doing all sorts of novel things in the mid-90s with plugins.

The reason it didn't really take off back then wasn't because of vision. It was because there was so little you could do with JavaScript. The browsers were still implementing the basic features and a lot of page/component manipulation was very broken. Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.

stan_rogers6y ago

Loading into a hidden or pixel-sized iframe (or ilayer in NS) was a thing before XMLHttpRequest as well. In what would now seem a scary technique, you would use JS to load more JS (plus data, of course) that would put the new data into the iframe's host page.

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mark-r6y ago

I remember when Java first came out. It seemed like a new and improved C++ and I was intrigued. When it became clear that it was being positioned as purely an applet language I lost all interest.

Then along came Javascript with its transparent attempt to ride the coattails of Java by adopting a similar name. No interest in that either.

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tasogare6y ago

> The browsers were still implementing the basic features

And they are still doing it. CSS Grid is not even 3 years old.

mr_toad6y ago

> Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.

Except that they couldn’t alter the DOM, or handle events on DOM elements, the two things that developers really needed (even if they didn’t know it).

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thedance6y ago

What did you need plugins for? Netscape and MSIE both were able to add a script tag to the DOM dynamically, and that was all you needed to build the rest of it.

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agumonkey6y ago

in 2004 a guy gave a talk about how they wrote large js apps, probably 1999-2000. they made a sturdy full fledged toolkit with nice prototypes. but at the time everything was in house

steegoOP6y ago

That's exactly why we were able to use it. For a while, we were IE only, but then we started to support Firefox (Only because the developers were fans and we started recommending it to users).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointssteego6y ago0 comments

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Darkphibre6y ago

That was a fun, well-paid project with lots of (non-exempt) overtime. Then the .com bubble popped.

skinnymuch6y ago

Should Microsoft get credit for inventing Ajax and having the first real world functioning example of it?

steegoOP6y ago

They do deserve some credit for intentionally introducing that feature to the browser as a standard feature, but the notion of fetching data without reloading the page wasn't novel at all.

That's what Java applets and plugins were for.

I'm also pretty sure they weren't the first to fetch data from the server without reloading, because people were doing all sorts of novel things in the mid-90s with plugins.

stan_rogers6y ago

1 more reply

mark-r6y ago

I remember when Java first came out. It seemed like a new and improved C++ and I was intrigued. When it became clear that it was being positioned as purely an applet language I lost all interest.

Then along came Javascript with its transparent attempt to ride the coattails of Java by adopting a similar name. No interest in that either.

1 more reply

tasogare6y ago

> The browsers were still implementing the basic features

And they are still doing it. CSS Grid is not even 3 years old.

mr_toad6y ago

> Applets and plug-ins were so much more capable.

Except that they couldn’t alter the DOM, or handle events on DOM elements, the two things that developers really needed (even if they didn’t know it).

2 more replies

thedance6y ago

What did you need plugins for? Netscape and MSIE both were able to add a script tag to the DOM dynamically, and that was all you needed to build the rest of it.

1 more reply

agumonkey6y ago

in 2004 a guy gave a talk about how they wrote large js apps, probably 1999-2000. they made a sturdy full fledged toolkit with nice prototypes. but at the time everything was in house

steegoOP6y ago

That's exactly why we were able to use it. For a while, we were IE only, but then we started to support Firefox (Only because the developers were fans and we started recommending it to users).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse