From time to time we will be featuring What Was Not Said, in which we, in the spirit of the Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, fill in the blanks creatively in an interview of some industry notable. In our inaugural edition we feature Charles Fitzgerald, Microsofts general manager for platform technologies in his remarks from the CNET story – Microsoft gets hip to AJAX.
Here is what Charles said:
“People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists. In some ways, this papers over the mess that is JavaScript development. Its easy-to-build spaghetti code.”
Here is what Charles could have easily added:
” Actually, we at Microsoft were the ones to first develop AJAX. We created it in the late 1990s with the XMLHTTPResponse and some of the other Web and XML technology that AJAX depends on. But then we stopped dead in our tracks on all JavaScript and DHTML development. That was followed with a ban on all further development of HTML, CSS, DOM and most other Web technologies on IE in late 2000. Nothing happened in Web Development at 1 Microsoft Way except through Web Services for 5 years . ”
“But then Firefox, Google Mail and Yahoo Flickr changed all that. So now we are back in, keeping our finger in the AJAX business pot. We are making sure we can put our proprietary stamp on the direction it takes. Atlas, our latest take on AJAX, will be grafted onto Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET. Cant discuss what it exactly will be – but think of it in the grand, “polluting-the-standard” tradition of J++ and J#.”
(c)JBSurveyer 2005