TechnoMagicians Blog

Wow, it wasn't long ago (Feb 1st and 8th, 2005) I wrote about Remote Scripting, Javascript and DHTML with reference to Gmail and Google Maps.

In no time this Ajax hype has taken the web by storm. The hype was started by this article posted by Jesse James Garret. 

I was just going to point to a book about Ajax I just heard about yesterday but found this post on it today. Funny guys!

Peter-Paul Koch wrote a decent article titled “Ajax, Promise or Hype”. Definitely worth the read.

I just want to quote a few things from the article here.

He explains under “old ideas”:

The ideas behind Ajax are not new. Some bloggers point to Apple Dev's Remote Scripting with IFRAME (2002) as the first article to deal with data retrieval. Matthew Haughey has done some experimenting back in 2001, and is glad to see these techniques come to the fore once again. I myself could go even further back in time to some inconclusive hidden frame experiments I did in 1999.

In theory asynchronous data retrieval became possible in 1996, when Netscape 2 was released with frames and JavaScript support. Nonetheless those early browsers weren't really suited for creating smooth interfaces, and when the browsing technology became better around 2001/2, cutting edge web developers had lost much of their interest in JavaScript because much of it was so pointeldly useless.

Brent followed up with a comment there to provide a bit more historical background:

Historical footnotes:

While Eric Costello's Apple article definitely raised remote scripting's profile in 2002, Erik Hatcher's IBM Developerworks article in Feb 2001 was one of the earliest high-profile articles on the subject.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-resc/?dwzone=web

I released the iframe-and-layer-based JSRS in 2000 specifically to provide cross-platform remote scripting to those who could not limit themselves to Microsoft's Java-based Remote Scripting. At the time, I was active in many scripting and DHTML newsgroups and forums, so I built it because JSRS filled what was a void at the time. There were plenty of successors – some superior to be sure, but historically I think JSRS preceded them.

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