Thursday, September 1, 2011

World Wide Web

Chasing the ghost of interactive television, many members of the computer market have missed a truly epoch-making event. In April 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina , working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NCSA at the University of Illinois released a first version of the graphical browser  Mosaic 1.0 forWWW. Although the Internet existed at that time about 20 years, the available communication protocols (FTP, telnet, etc.) to have been very uncomfortable and the Global Network was only used in academic and government environments. Mosaic is based on a new markup language hypertext documents (HyperText Markup Language, HTML), which was developed in 1991 at the European Institute of Particle Physics (CERN) specifically to provide information on the Internet. This format allows you to view text and images, and most importantly - support links by which you can navigate with one click as another part of the same page and a page that could reside in a completely different part of the network anywhere in the world. These are the cross-appeal, using which, users can unwittingly set of nodes to visit the Internet, and allowed to assume that all HTML-documents related to parts of a whole - the World Wide Web (World Wide Web, WWW).

And most important - all these new developments were completely free and available to everyone. For the first time ordinary computer users without any special training to enjoy a global network not only to address operational issues, but also to find information on various topics. The number of documents in the WWW space began to grow exponentially, and soon the Internet has become a real World. True, eventually found that this way of organizing and storing information is very similar to the dump, which is extremely difficult to find information on some specific issue, but this topic applies to a completely different stage of development of the computer world. So, in some incomprehensible way Sun does not see the birth of a new era. Technical Director, Sun first saw Mosaic, only three months later! And despite the fact that about 50% of servers and workstations on the Internet were made by Sun.

The new business plan aims to FirstPerson, which was a kind of intermediate step of interactive TV features to Internet. The idea was to create a platform for cable operators, users, which would have been ordinary users of personal computers, integrated networks of such companies. Using technology OaK, developers could create applications for functionality similar programs distributed on CD-ROM, but have the interactivity that enables people to share any information through the network. It was expected that these networks and eventually develop into interactive TV, and then becomes a full OaK solution for the industry. On the Internet, and Mosaic has not said a word.

For many reasons, this plan did not accept the leadership of Sun (it is not fully consistent with the main expectation - a new development should lead to an increase in demand for products of Sun). Because of the lack of prospects FirstPerson half of the staff was transferred to the newly created command Sun Interactive, which has continued to engage in multimedia services without the OaK. All the company was threatened inglorious death, but at this point Bill Joy once again supported the project, which soon gave the world a platform for Java.

When the creators of FirstPerson, finally, drew attention to the Internet, they realized that the functionality of the network applications that created OaK, very close to the WWW.Bill Joy remembered how he had twenty years ago was involved in the development of UNIX at Berkeley, and then the operating system was very wide spread because it can be downloaded online for free. This principle of free distribution of commercial products made itself WWW, in the same way the company soon became the leader of the Netscape browser market, so many of the technologies had the opportunity to grab market share as soon as possible. These new ideas with the support of Joy finally convinced the Sun, that the Internet will help raise the platform OaK (by the way, this new project initially called "Liveoak"). In the end, Joey sits down to write the next business plan and sends Gosling and Naughton to begin work on adapting OaK for the Internet.Gosling revising the code platform, and Naughton is taken for writing "killer" application that would be immediately demonstrated the power of OaK for the Internet.

In fact, these technologies are well come to each other. Programming Languages ​​has always played an important role in the development of computer technology.Mainframes were not particularly useful until a Cobol. With language, Fortran on IBM, computers have become widely used for scientific computing and research. Altair BASIC - is the first product from Microsoft - allowed all hobbyists to create programs for their personal computers. C + + has become the basis for the development of graphical user interfaces, such as Mac OS and Windows. Creators OaK done everything to make this technology has played a similar role in programming for the Internet.

Despite the fact that by mid-1994 WWW reached unprecedented dimensions (of course, by the standards of the time), web-pages were still more like a traditional paper publication, than for interactive applications. For the most part all the work in the network was to send a request to the web-server and receiving a reply, which contained the usual static HTML-file, the browser displayed on the client side. Even then, the functionality of web-servers extended with the help of CGI (Common Gateway Interface).This technology allows the client's request to run a normal program on the server and the result sent back in response. Since then the speed of communication channels was low (although, it seems, users will never be satisfied with the possibilities of the apparatus), the client could wait a few minutes to see a message stating that he made a mistake in one letter request. Dynamic charting with this method of implementation would be to generate the GIF-files in real time. But often the client machines are full-fledged personal computer that could take a significant part of the user experience for themselves, relieving servers.

Generally, a client-server architecture, just need for most complex corporate (enterprise) applications, has a number of technical difficulties. The basic idea - to place the general data on a server to create a single information space for many users, and programs that display and allow easy editing of these data are executed on client machines. Very often, a corporation uses multiple hardware platforms (it can be as "heritage" and a consequence of the fact that different departments, solving their problems, need a different computer). Consequently, the application needs to be developed in several versions, which greatly increases the cost of support. Also, update the client side means that you need to reconfigure every computer company in the shortest possible time. But the updates often involved several groups of developers.

Trying to make Internet-browser features a full client encounters even greater difficulties.First, the usual increase of the maximum - on the Internet are nearly all existing platforms, and the number of geographically dispersed users and makes a quick update just impossible. Second, it is particularly acute question of security. Through a network of remarkably quickly spread not only important information, but also viruses. Textual information and images do not contain any threat to the client machine, and another thing - an executable code. Finally, an application with a beautiful and convenient graphical interface, as a rule, had no small amount, that's why the primary means of dissemination were CD-ROMs. It is clear that the Internet had to work hard over a compact package.

If you look at the history of OaK, it becomes clear that this platform is an amazing meet all the requirements Internet-programming, although it was created at a time when about WWW nobody even thought of. Apparently, this indicates how well the development of industry foresight project participants Green.

6 comments:

DRJT at September 1, 2011 at 5:43 AM said...

Brilliant read. Very educational as well.

I plan on showing quite a few other people this blog post ;)

Give Everything at September 1, 2011 at 1:04 PM said...

the world wide web..the fuck would we do without it! nice blog, following!

Dragmire at September 2, 2011 at 5:51 AM said...

Interesting read. I shall follow your blog from now on. Good day, sir.

T Papar at September 2, 2011 at 5:53 AM said...

great blog with very good information!
+followed

Mark J P at September 2, 2011 at 6:32 AM said...

Interesting blog ^^

Unknown at September 2, 2011 at 6:37 AM said...

really interesting info there thx for sharing

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