The Underscore Archives

On 22 May 2008, at 13:20, Rick Hurst wrote:
>
> I'd also like to point out that a few years ago, during one of my
> moments of inflated self importance I once had a rant about how I had
> been using JIF (Javascript and Inline Frames) to achieve the same
> functionality as you get from AJAX, years before it was invented...

Mmm... like "Web 2.0", AJAX is a name for something that has been done  
in various forms by many people for many years :)  (Not to  
specifically disparage what you've done, Rick... I wouldn't claim to  
invent it either.)

The problem with all these things (like Comet) is that they're just  
rediscoveries of old techniques, and unfortunately, no-one's learned  
any lessons from last time!

For example, the whole rediscovery of "server-push" seems to omit the  
fact that it all worked absolutely fine as early as 1995 (I remember  
the "Batman Forever" website using server-push rather than animated  
GIFs, and I was writing simple web messaging stuff using multipart/x- 
mixed-replace through NPH scripts on the CERN httpd back then too),  
but there were scalability problems (eg. MaxClients has to be >= the  
actual number of concurrent users!), and then Microsoft killed it by  
failing to support it in IE.

HTTP (and arguably, even TCP) is just not suitable for push stuff,  
even if it's possible to hack together using multipart, polling, etc.   
Server Sent Events, for example, are a gruesome hack, and will cost a  
fortune in web servers and bandwidth worldwide, if they lift off.

There are better ways to do things like this.

...

Incidentally, anyone want to help me with writing a UDP- or SCTP-based  
message passing library? :)

Tom

-- 
Tom Gidden
http://imitr.net/