Google Pioneers Use Old Microsoft Tools In New Web Programs
By Lee Gomes
Wall Street Journal
March 14, 2005; Page B1
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111075227698078072,00.html?mod=technology%5Ffeatured%5Fstories%5Fhs
Meet Ajax, the technology powerhouse. For years, it has been living
indolently on your computer, never really doing much of anything.
In the past few months, though, computer programmers, most notably those at
Google, have begun to wake up Ajax and put it to work. And as a result, the
computer industry may never be the same.
Ajax is a recently coined name for a dense mouthful of software
technologies that are built into Web browsers. The most important of them
are JavaScript, a computer-programming language; dynamic HTML, which is a
way of displaying information on a screen; and XMLHTTP, a procedure a Web
browser can use to very quickly get information from a central server.
To see what they are capable of, go to maps.google.com, zoom into a
location, click inside the map and then drag the image around. It's Ajax
that is moving the map for you, scrolling it much faster than you're
probably used to on the Web.
Browsers have been getting and displaying information since the Web began.
What's new is that Ajax lets them do so in a speedier way. In the past, to
change even a small part of a Web page required reloading the entire page.
But Ajax knows to fetch only the part of the screen that needs changing --
like the edges of the Google map window as you move around.
Because less information is being sent from the main server, things move
more quickly. That takes Ajax applications a big step toward the Holy Grail
of having the kinds of speed and responsiveness in Web-based programs
that's usually associated only with desktop software, like Microsoft Office.
Sealing the Ajax deal for many programmers is the fact that everything
required for it is standard, generic software that isn't owned by any
company and that exists in every browser. It's as if someone discovered
how, just by doing a little welding in a car engine, you could double the
car's gasoline mileage.
The term Ajax was coined last month by Jesse James Garrett, of the San
Francisco Web consulting firm Adaptive Path. He came up with the
pseudo-acronym in the shower while searching for a shorthand way to explain
to clients how the recent offerings by Google can perform so robustly.
Google, notes Mr. Garrett, isn't the first to use Ajax. Pieces can be seen
on Netflix, the film-rental site, and Flickr, a photo-sharing site. But
Google has done the most with it, betting the farm on Ajax not only for
Maps but also for its Gmail free e-mail service and several other
offerings. (Not all Google software uses Ajax; its popular Toolbar, for
example, doesn't.)
Google is also one of the most closely watched technology companies on
Earth, so now that it has shown that Ajax can result in powerful
applications used daily by millions of people, software programmers
everywhere are getting excited.
The winners here are anyone who wants to build a new generation of Internet
programs, especially Google, which hasn't been shy about moving into areas
previously connected with Microsoft.
Who loses? For one, Sun Microsystems, which has for years talked up its
Java programming language for precisely these sorts of jobs. Instead of
Java, Ajax-style programming uses JavaScript -- no relation -- which is
easier to work with and built free into every browser.
Another potential loser, of course, is Microsoft, which doesn't much like
the fact that its upstart rival Google is setting the agenda for the
world's computer programmers -- and in such an offhanded way at that.
(Google is way too cool for anything as gauche as news releases; it usually
just puts new programs on its Web site and waits for the world to beat a
path to its door. Much of the explication of Google's innovative work was
done by outside programmers like Jim Ley in London and Philip Lindsay in
New Zealand.)
There is a barn-sized irony in all this. Many of the Ajax technologies were
developed by Microsoft, back when it was fighting Sun over Java. At the
time, Microsoft was beefing up Internet Explorer to make it a rival to
Java. Now those tools exist everywhere, even in the hands of Microsoft rivals.
The obvious question is how far programmers at Google or elsewhere can go
with Ajax. Specifically, can they build Ajax versions of Word or Excel,
thus threatening half of Microsoft's revenue? Of course, schemes to take
down Microsoft are as old as the hills. And Microsoft has long argued that
it has so many years of intense development in Office that a newcomer
couldn't easily duplicate the familiar Office user experience, certainly
not in a Web application, even a newfangled one.
Maybe this time, though, the technology pieces for a successful challenge
are finally in place. Disk storage, for one, is now so cheap that it would
cost Google mere pennies to store all of the average person's
word-processing files.
Google, naturally, isn't saying what it will do next. And when you talk to
its programmers, like Paul Buchheit, the brains behind Gmail, they say all
they're doing is writing cool programs, the sort they themselves enjoy using.
It's as though any discussion of the larger strategic uses of their
software would be somehow, well, unseemly. You can bet, though, that Bill
Gates wouldn't be so coy.
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
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