REST is Dying. Get Rid of It.
TIGER: Advanced Easier Webservices You Can Use Today
I’ve been programming computers since the 1980s. In that time, I’ve seen and used a lot of languages and technologies that have come and gone. I watched as the web blossomed with new features, like browsers exchanging XML data asynchronously. Today we call this Asynchronous JavaScript and XML data exchange “AJAX”, but ironically, AJAX doesn’t typically even use XML anymore. Most of the time, this data is exchanged as JSON, or YAML, HTML or some other format.
In 1996, Microsoft engineers introduced the iframe tag in IE4. This allowed the browser to asynchronously exchange data with the same or a totally different server without a page refresh, and that data could be passed to the parent object that spawned the iframe object.
At the time, the new feature seemed little more than a wiz-bang “frames” feature to me (I know, you don’t know what HTML frames are; yes I’m that old, thanks for the reminder). However, my brother was using this technology in commercial projects in the mid-1990s to do just that—make “AJAX” data calls with XML even before the term “AJAX” had been invented.
A couple of years later Microsoft would create theXMLHttpRequest object in IE5. Other browser vendors would follow suit, and the era of “AJAX” was born.
