Ajax from AOL’s Perspective
Once upon a time AOL was cool. Serious. Think way back. Now think further.
Many of us coming online had done our stint with campus bulletin boards or CompuServe, didn’t quite know what these Internets were all about, and could suddenly get an email address that somewhat, sort of, resembled our name, and even access content.
Beyond that though, the company had some roots. A quick purview of the gospel according to Wikipedia tells us that this was a gaming company. And check out these early bonafides:
- Graphical chat environments Habitat (1986-1988) and Club Caribe (1988) from LucasArts
- The first online interactive fiction series QuantumLink Serial by Tracy Reed (1988)
- Quantum Space, the first fully automated Play by email game (1989-1991
- The original Dungeons & Dragons title Neverwinter Nights from Stormfront Studios (1991-1997), the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) to depict the adventure with graphics instead of text (1991)
- The first chat room-based text role-playing game Black Bayou (1996-2004), a horror role-playing game from Hecklers Online and ANTAGONIST, Inc.
Beyond that, AOL provided a corner for some 30 million Americans to get their feet wet online. It wasn’t the real Internet. It was more of a content ghetto but that’s all well and good. You can’t blame a company for providing a service that 30 million people glom onto. You can only blame them for not letting them go.
Remember the pre-bubble 2000 AOL/Time-Warner merger? That was swagger. It wasn’t even a merger. AOL bought Time-Warner. And that’s where many thought the future of the industry would go. Marry a company that provides access to a company that oozes content, and you got yourself a marriage made in heaven. Or so the story went.
The last six years has been about how the story goes. And when we think about it, we think about desperate AOL CD’s in our mailboxes promising a gabillion hours of unfettered modem access that no one wanted anymore.
We think of AOL as an Icarus that flew hard and fast, and then crashed and burned. Even PC Magazine (PC Magazine!) piled on. Not only was AOL on the top 25 all-time worst software list, it crushed the competition.
But a funny thing happened en route, and that funny thing is that AOL maintained core developers and those core developers are plenty smart. If you kick back and think about it, the mistakes made were on the business front.
We’ve never had problems with the technologies AOL programmers put out. Matter of fact, we’re entirely grateful about AOL’s whole Live 8 concert experience that blew open Web video as a viable medium.
Which leads us to William Morris, vice president of Products and Technology at AOL. Here he talks about all this. And he talks about a whole lot more, specifically, how Ajax is one of the underlying design principles used by AOL to create some of the company’s most popular applications and services that are used by millions around the world.
In this keynote from the Ajax Experience, Morris addresses the Ajax challenges AOL has overcome in finding the right tools and people to deliver these applications and services, as well as discussing some of the lessons learned in order to create services that can scale to reach AOL’s millions of users.
In addition, Morris demonstrates some of AOL’s Ajax-based services including AOL Webmail and AOL Pictures.
Morris shows us that despite its follies and foibles, AOL just might, perhaps, be regaining fashionable ground, and through initiatives like OpenID, and its developer network it might be back on its feet after a few years of stumbling around.
William Morris has over 15 years of experience in the software industry, delivering products to both developer and consumer audiences. As vice president of Products and Technology at AOL, Morris oversees products including AOL Blogs, AOL Pictures, AOL’s Webmail, as well as core infrastructure products.
Prior to working on AOL consumer products, Morris worked in various positions at the Sun | Netscape alliance, focusing on Identity Management Services, including LDAP Directory Servers. Before joining Netscape, he worked at Borland International, focusing on international expansion and delivery of the RAD developer products and Borland Database products.
Morris attended Amersham College in the UK before starting his software career and joining Ashton-Tate Europe.
This article was created by the editors and producers at ScribeMedia.Org.
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