Kudos to XmlHttp and IE7

Published 01 February 06 04:35 PM | despos

Now that Programming ASP.NET 2.0 Applications--Advanced Topics is almost ready for printers, I see the sunlight again :)

I just needed to find a good topic to blog about. Here's one.

As you can read in a much greater detail here from the direct voice of the team, IE7 is going to incorporate XmlHttp in its own object model. As you know, XmlHttp is one of the least known but most crucial software invention of the past (hex) century. Introduced by IE5 back in 1999 but already used in Web interface of Exchange, and regardless of the XML in the name, it is merely a HTTP object model. You use it as a component to send HTTP requests to a public URL. Today, XmlHttp is at the heart of Atlas, Ajax.NET, and ASP.NET Script callbacks.

Without XmlHttp nothing of the above would be possible.

For one time, the "other" good guys had to copy (ehm, get inspired) by Microsoft's "bad" guys. XmlHttp was soon incorporated in Mozilla and made available to Netscape, Firefox, Safari, and Opera users.

Quite paradoxically, though, the Mozilla implementation of XmlHttp was "better" than the MS original implementation for the simple fact that it was incorporated in the browser's scripting object model. In IE6 and below, XmlHttp is an ActiveX component and requires users to lower their security settings to accept ActiveX components safe for scripting.

This state of things finally ends with IE7. It is a great news and it was about time. Thanks guys!

Comments

# Andrey Skvortsov said on February 1, 2006 03:57 PM:

Sad news-it still dosen't work in latest "preview" bits,not in ..56 nor ..59:-(

# Steven said on February 2, 2006 04:29 AM:

Dino,

when is your book coming out?

Thanks

# Marc Brooks said on February 6, 2006 01:44 AM:

Ordered the book, thanks for the link. What's next on the list? Any chance you're going to write a project walkthrough for a "real site" that shows how to use all the bits in a production environment, focusing on Ajax and DataSources and end-user customization?

# Mads Kristensen said on February 6, 2006 04:51 PM:

I'm looking forward to a better implementation of xmlhttp in IE. In simple asp.net client callback functions, I found that the xmlhttp is much faster in both Firefox and Opera compared to IE6.

IE6 also have som problems with larger amount of xml being sent over xmlhttp and added to the page throug the DOM. The innerHTML property of for instance a <div> gets very unstable, which result in javascript error in some cases.

Anyway, it's good news and i'm looking very much forward to that improvement.

# DinoE said on February 7, 2006 03:58 AM:

Hi Mads
what you say about the perf makes a lot of sense and I believe it's entirely due to the ActiveX-based implementation

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