Comment by catscratch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by catscratch | Hacker News Reader

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A history of new things geared toward web app developers, starting with relevant popular technologies:

Late 1970s: microcomputers, explosion of BASIC and ASM development

Early 1980s: proliferation of modems, BBS's become big, Compuserve becomes big- people able to read news online and chat in real-time (but not popular like much later). software stores, software pirating, computer clubs, widespread use of Apple II's in schools. Microsoft Flight Simulator released in 1982 is first super-popular 3D simulation software.

Mid-1980s: GUIs- Macintosh 1984 based on ideas from Xerox PARC.

Late 1980s: Graphics had more colors, more resolution, faster processors. So- cooler games. File servers. 1987 GIF format, 1989 GIF format supporting animation, transparency, metadata- not that popularly used though- was a compuserve thing.

Early 1990s: Internet, realistic quality pictures, webpages/browsing, global file servers. Mosaic web browser. Most pages involved horizontal rule dividers that might be rainbow animated GIFs. Bulleted lists. Under construction GIFs were popular. Linux. JPEG format. Netscape. Blink tags.

Mid 1990s: Windows 95 (with Winsock). IE vs Netscape. IE had marquees. VBScript. (Mocha->LiveScript->)JavaScript. Applets. Shockwave. WebCrawler search. Altavista search. OOP pretty solidly how you should program now with C++ having been around for a while and Java slow but write once/run anywhere and OOP. Apache webserver. CGI: can email from webpage.

Late 1990s: ActionScript. Google search. CSS. Extreme programming. Scrum. JSP. Some using ORM via Toplink. Java session vs. entity beans. IIS. Java multithreading. Amazon gets patent for 1-click ordering. AOL instant messenger. PhP.

Early 2000s: ASP. .Net/C#. Hibernate ORM (free). Choosing between different Java container servers.

Mid 2000s: Use CSS not tables. Rails.

Late 2000s: SPA and automatic updating of content in background via Ajax. Mobile apps. Mobile web. Scala. Cloud computing start. VMs. Streaming video mature. Configuration management via Chef/Puppet.

Early 2010s: Cloud computing standard. Container virtualization. Video conferencing is normal- not just big company office thing. Orchestration of VMs more normal.

Mid 2010s: Container Quantum computing starts at a basic level (not important yet).

Note how I can't really thing of anything recently that has to do with new things in webdev.

Dejavu:

> Early 2010s: Cloud computing

1960s: Client/Server Architecture. Big servers and small clients.

> Mid 2010s: Quantum computing

before 1950s: Analog Computers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer

There is nothing new under the sun. Analog computers passed away because they were not usable. Ok, quantum computing may be different but their practical use is also questionable.

> Dejavu: [...] 1960s: Client/Server Architecture. Big servers and small clients.

This is right and wrong at the same time. Right, because the Cloud reuses some basic concepts from the mainframe era (e.g., virtualization), which had been neglected for some time. Wrong, because writing your application to run efficiently on a mainframe is totally different from writing your application to run efficiently on Cloud infrastructure. Also, there is no thing such as small clients anymore, mobile apps and Web frontends are nowadays as complex as the usual 1980s fat-client software.

IMHO this is a very good example for technology not making circles, but evolving in spirals.

> there is no thing such as small clients anymore

This is also right and wrong :-) Right regarding your perception, wrong regarding relative power. 1960s clients were small compared to today's small clients. However, 60s server were also small in relation to cloud servers. Today our small clients provide browsers and stuff like that but they aren't useful without servers. They can't run top-notch 3D games without high-end servers. The third wave of C/S will be in the area of A.I. with (small) clients which will possibly as powerful as today's cloud servers.

Trends:

Ajax, Long polling, WebSockets

jQuery/MooTools/Prototype, Bootstrap/CanMVC, Angular/React

Javascript debugging tools, profiling, 60fps, responsive pages, AMP

RSS, Web Push, WebRTC

HTTP Auth, Cookies, oAuth, new social protocols

Perl, Java, PHP, Node.js, Go

Thanks! You caught some ones I missed, so here are some edits and responses to your list:

1. I didn't mean to put "container" in front of quantum computing.

2. I didn't mention history of certs or encryption, as I think that security is often a feeling rather than a reality. I'm not sure that "HTTPS everywhere" plugin and then movement in early 2000s was innovation more than it was tightening up security after Firesheep.

3. Yes, I should've included WebSockets over long polling in Early 2010s.

4. Yes, RSS mattered- 1999/Early 2000s.

5. I probably shouldn't have mentioned OOP, etc. as I didn't mean for methodology to matter, since it doesn't matter to users. Similarly debugging tools don't matter for innovations that users see.

6. Yes, fluid layout, grid layout, and responsive design in Late 2000s (though Audi had responsive in 2001).

7. jQuery/MooTools/Prototype, Bootstrap/CanMVC, Angular/React - none of the implementation details of these things matter. The only things that matter are how things appear to the user- like whether a page has a clunky refresh or smooth transition and whether things update automatically when they are changed elsewhere. Also, Applets, Flash, frames, and the move to JS all screwed the visually impaired.

8. Cookies mattered because they were used to track users in ways they didn't want to be tracked. People disabling JS for a while mattered. US announcing Java was insecure mattered. Flash and Flash being abandoned mattered.

9. Forgot to mention frames in Mid/Late 1990s.

10. As you mentioned oAuth, SSO becoming a big deal in the Late 2000s with Facebook, Google.

And I should have mentioned blogging, microblogging, move of much of the web to Facebook, Tor/private web, peer sharing and impact on music industry as well as impact on the value of well-created data and applications vs. the value of constantly creating data and making data available and clear.

Despite all of the things I missed, the point is that the things that really matter aren't new libraries and frameworks- they are technology and how the world uses it. If a user can't tell a positive difference between something you were doing 5 years ago and today, then you didn't really innovate.

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