Alte Programme machen neue Tricks
Ein schönes Beispiel für Innovationen die nach hinten losgehen … aka, unintended consequences … IMHO kein Wunder … E-Business und die zugehörigen Technologien sind nun einmal versatile, d.h. eben auch offen für viele Zwecke und offen für findige Geister …
Der Artikel aus dem WSJ ist nicht offen zugänglich, hier nur ein paar Auszüge … aus dem Blog von Peter O’Kelly.
WSJ.com – Portals: Google Pioneers Use Old Microsoft Tools In New Web Programs
WSJ.com – Portals: “Meet Ajax, the technology powerhouse. For years, it has been living indolently on your computer, never really doing much of anything.
In the past few months, though, computer programmers, most notably those at Google, have begun to wake up Ajax and put it to work. And as a result, the computer industry may never be the same.
Ajax is a recently coined name for a dense mouthful of software technologies that are built into Web browsers. The most important of them are JavaScript, a computer-programming language; dynamic HTML, which is a way of displaying information on a screen; and XMLHTTP, a procedure a Web browser can use to very quickly get information from a central server.
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Who loses? For one, Sun Microsystems, which has for years talked up its Java programming language for precisely these sorts of jobs. Instead of Java, Ajax-style programming uses JavaScript — no relation — which is easier to work with and built free into every browser.
Another potential loser, of course, is Microsoft, which doesn’t much like the fact that its upstart rival Google is setting the agenda for the world’s computer programmers — and in such an offhanded way at that. (Google is way too cool for anything as gauche as news releases; it usually just puts new programs on its Web site and waits for the world to beat a path to its door. Much of the explication of Google’s innovative work was done by outside programmers like Jim Ley in London and Philip Lindsay in New Zealand.)
There is a barn-sized irony in all this. Many of the Ajax technologies were developed by Microsoft, back when it was fighting Sun over Java. At the time, Microsoft was beefing up Internet Explorer to make it a rival to Java. Now those tools exist everywhere, even in the hands of Microsoft rivals.”
Aber das ist noch nicht alles … nett ist eben auch dass Tools wie JavaScript eine wichtige Rolle bei der Firefox Erweiterung GreaseMonkey spielen …
GreaseMonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to add “user scripts”: bits of JavaScript which are attached to a particular URL or set of URLs that run when that URL is visited. In essence, it’s like having a bookmarklet that does something useful to a page and having that bookmarklet automatically run when certain pages are visited. With the powers of introspection that come from the DOM, JavaScript can make any changes to a page that it likes, and this is where GreaseMonkey comes in very handy.
… und damit kann man ganz easy Googles AdSense Geschäftsmodell erledigen …
