• Gmail was the first popular web application that really showed off what was possible with client-side JavaScript.
• Today, Gmail is the classic example of a single-page JavaScript app; it can respond immediately to user interactions and no longer needs to make roundtrips to the server just to render a new page.
• Ajax described a set of technologies, of which JavaScript was the backbone, used to create web applications where data can be loaded in the background, avoiding the need for full page refreshes.
• The revised architecture renders the initial pages on the server, but asynchronously bootstraps a new modular JavaScript application to provide the fully-featured interactive experience their users expect.
• The user’s browser runs no JavaScript at all until after the initial content, rendered on the server, is visible.

@techjunkiejh: A history of #JavaScript across the stack #angularjs #nodejs

Did you know that JavaScript was created in 10 days? In May 1995, Brendan Eich wrote the first version of JavaScript in 10 days while working at Netscape.

For the first 10 years of JavaScript’s life, professional programmers denigrated JavaScript because its target audience consisted of “amateurs”. That changed in 2004 with the launch of Gmail. Gmail was the first popular web application that really showed off what was possible with client-side JavaScript. Competing e-mail services such as Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail featured extremely slow interfaces that used server-side rendering almost exclusively, with almost every action by the user requiring the server to reload the entire web page. Gmail began to work around these limitations by using XMLHttpRequest for asynchronous data retrieval from the server. Gmail’s use of JavaScript caught the attention of developers around the world. Today, Gmail is the classic example of a single-page JavaScript app; it can respond immediately to user interactions and no longer needs to make roundtrips to the server just to render a new page.

A year later in 2005, Google launched Google Maps, which used the same technology as Gmail to transform online maps into an interactive experience. With Google Maps, Google was also the first large company to offer a JavaScript API for one of their services allowing developers to integrate Google Maps into their websites.

approach in Gmail and Google Maps ultimately came to be called Ajax (originally “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”). Ajax described a…