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The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.2 History Of Web Development
Page: #9

I am not saying though that javascript did not have its ups before 2004; early versions of outlook in exchange 2000 were coded in js, even yahoo mail/chat used js. Though if any developer looks at the literature pre-2004 it was mostly on how to create pop-up windows and make text fly around the screen. It was not seen as the serious language that it is now. A second reason for the lag of javascript has to do with the time involved with the creation of xml libraries for popular server languages. Since xml and json are the only ways to deliver data to javascript this also slowed the adoption rate. A third reason being the term AJAX was first coined as recent as 2005, javascript saw significant growth after gmail and post-ajax.

Today javascript enjoys the title of being the most popular programming language on the planet, java has shifted to being one of the most popular server development languages. So at the end of the day everyone was happy. Flash is used in many ways, but it is most often seen in popular video sites such as youtube leveraging its video capabilities. Applets are used to a much lesser extent, I have seen them deployed though for securing data transfers, and when the java api is needed. Java applets were fairly mis-positioned though, since java user interface is mainly intended for desktop applications sun shifted focus to launch-able internet applications via webstart. Java applet technology was not able to compete effectively against (designer oriented) flash studio, and the sizable consumption of the flash player.

Since distribution of a technology is all that matters regarding the internet, sun handicapped java with its microsoft lawsuit, and under-capitalizing its consumer product. Sun had the classic issue of being to tech oriented, and not nearly as consumer focused as they should of been. Imagine a bunch of geeks creating a technology so advanced it would drive the industry for the next 15 years, but not having a clue what products to make with it or how to sell it. That is like creating a video game console, but having no titles for it. This is the issue that plagued sun, they were a hardware company and not a software company and did not make competitive consumer products for their invention. Eventually, Sun was pushed to the wayside an end ominous of xerox, apple (pre 1999), etc. whos’ ideas other companies capitalized from.

As a side note: I often see suns fate similar to that of apple back in the 80′s. Sun and Apple both thought they “owned” a market, and the ideas that flowed through that new market. This is a fatal mistake, because a company never actually “owns” a market until they create consumer products which justify ownership. This is similar to the idea of filing a patent, and never capitalizing on that patent. If you do not capitalize on a patent for which you own, when someone else does, you may lose entitlement to “said” patent. There is not one company out there; not one, who owns a market but yet has no top-of-the-line consumer product for that market. At the end of the day companies own products/services, and products/services own parts of a market. More on this in Volume 1, The Software Company, but just something to keep in mind.

Update: 04/21/2009,  Sun Was Bought By Oracle

Alpha Edition!, e-mail spelling/grammer/topic suggestions to mattprokes@gmail.com

The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.2 History Of Web Development
Page: #8

So one thing that applets did well was provide a container to build web applications, the issue with this is those same web applications could never leave the boundary of that container. The second issue is that applets were compiled, which made interfaces difficult to debug. The third issue is that java was never intended to be the language of the internet, but instead an application of the internet (similar to navigator its self). At the end of the day this ended up being the nail in the coffin for applets, since they required users download a plug-in in order to use them. Although java applets are still around today, they are at constant battle with competing technologies such as flash and silverlight. Flash by far being the most popular of the three running on nearly 95% of web browsers (though the versions of that 95% are not all up-to-date).

Javascript on the other hand took a bit longer to come into the forefront, it also took some other technologies to help it along in becoming the language that it is today (CSS, XML, XSLT, XPATH, SVG, VML). The first milestone for javascript was its acceptance as a web standard by 1997, though by that time there were already dialects of the original Netscape javascript, specifically JScript. Though again the standard of 1997 was hardly a powerful language.

In 1998 Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer 5.0 (which by that time overtook Netscape) it supported dom level 1. Dom, or the Document Object Model allows you to modify markup dynamically. Dom level 0 was very limited in that you could only modify things like image tags and form elements, later versions of dom (specifically versions 1+) allows modification of any markup element available on the page, as well as xml. This feature alone basically replaced much (but not all) of the need for applets, and did not require any specialized plug-ins.

Here is where things get interesting; with the release of any new technology (especially for the internet), it usually takes a few years for adoption. So Dom Level 1 may have been released in late 1998, it does not mean though that it was completely adopted by the internet until around 2000, 2001. For javascript specifically the adoption rate was a bit slower due to a market that at the time was dominated by applets and the emerging flash technologies. It wasn’t until a little company known as google (circa 2004) started to base their entire delivery platform around javascript; that javascript won back much of the respect which it had lost.

Alpha Edition!, e-mail spelling/grammer/topic suggestions to mattprokes@gmail.com

The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.2 History Of Web Development
Page: #7

That brings us to the internet of today, todays’ internet was actually popularized by several companies most notably AOL, but to a lesser extent prodigy and compuserve. All of these companies originally started off offering online services for things such as games and electronic mail. By the early to mid nineties AOL started to surpass all of its competitors by several orders of magnitude first with e-mail, games, chat and then with web technology upon availability. By 1993 Mosaic the first modern web browser was released; with the ability to read html, the first widely used internet language.

Mosaic was the product of the NCSA developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, it was free and at first only available on xwindows, later it was ported to windows and was a hit! Mosaic browser introduced people to the internet, but Netscape made it popular, starting in 1994 Netscape Navigator was released. Navigator code-base was actually a commercialized version of mosaic, as thus a direct descendant. The first public version of Javascript (2.0) was released in late 1995 for navigator by Netscape.

At the time javascript was primitive and could not do much more then a few pop-ups here, and there. Another issue was that it was only supported by Netscape navigator at the time and was not a standard as it is today. Thus the release of javascript was wasn’t as big of a deal as say Sun Microsystems Java Technology (not related to javascript) which was released in 1995 as well.

What made java different for the internet was applets, which allowed a person to write a bit of software once and run it on any platform (a very big deal at the time). Applets allowed you to embed a platform agnostic user interface into the applet, and run it directly from your website. The introduction of these two technologies javascript and java applets marked the beginning of web applications (as we know them today).

From these two technologies also spawned several others namely flash, vbscript, and silverlight

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The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.2 History Of Web Development
Page: #6

The internet, as it stands today is actually a massive collection of public and private networks, linked together by content. The act of using the internet as it is today actually makes you part of the internet . How can that be? I am willing to bet that last time you checked you do not recall building a yahoo or a google. As mentioned earlier the internet is all about content, and content is created by users of the internet. Thus every time you submit an e-mail, make a blog posting, even browse a web site you are helping the internet grow, acquire statistics and data about humans, and just be generally interesting . So lets get going with the history, it all started back nearly 50 years ago with this brand new idea of the computer network, now computer networks back then were not nearly anything like what they are today, but you can think of them in the simplest terms as a way of sending data from one location to another through a wire.

The facility which enables two computers to send data back and forth to each other is called a “network”, and back in those days the only one in town was ARPANET . ARPANET was actually originally developed by the united states department of defense, in the name of protecting information in the case of an attack on united states’ facilities during the cold war. The united states at the time was looking for a way to quickly send information from one location to another, rather then having all data centralized in one location. It was also important that the network was “fault tolerant”, and would continue to operate even if parts of it were removed during a transmission. The first network named ARPANET was switched on in october 1969; and the rest is history, though in 1969 you can be sure that there was no e-mail and no chat rooms.

That would come later in 1971 when Ray Tomlinson sent his first network based e-mail. E-mail which was an instant hit on ARPANET pushed the technology into popularity among researchers, and throughout the 70′s and early 80′s ARPA enjoyed many new developments on the network. From the 80′s to the 90′s several other networks were conceptualized; and executed on, most notable though was NSFNET, which provided the initial backbone to the internet. The only issues with NSFNET, the backbone was not distributed, and if one wanted to simply use the backbone they had to first sign an agreement to do it. It was not a big deal for most of the population at the time though since the internet was not popularized until the early-mid 90′s, keep in mind web pages did not really exist until 1993 with the release of Mosaic.

If you would like to read the detailed and complete history of the internet you can find it here: History Of The Internet

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The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.2 History Of Web Development
Page: #5

Web Technology and Web Applications are just one of the ideas that has sprung into the present recently; the internet (in its current incarnation), was not thought possible fifteen years ago. In fact fifteen years ago most companies’ idea of the future was placing simple text on a document that ended with the letters .html with never a thought that the document could mean more, and do more then just communicating the ideas of the organization

Many organizations still feel that way today, that is slowly but surely changing as the google’s, facebook’s, twitter’s and yahoo’s of the world shape the future path of technology and information to be a more distributed and connected then ever before possible. The interesting part is that the technology landscape has shifted so much over the past few years; companies are looking to deliver applications that they develop through the internet, allowing instant updates for clients of that technology.

Computing is more and more remotely distributed through the delivery of web-applications these days, and the ways in which a computer interacts with the world has significantly changed since 1998. Most technology companies of the future will exist in an environment where data and data services are paramount to their core business, where communication and collaboration are paramount for survival.  How did we get here though? Many of the possibilities that exist only as recent as a couple years ago are what computer scientists have dreamed about for the past 40-50  (see project xanadu). So before we get going,  lets first take a step back in time and talk about the history of web technologies.