May 2010
Beginner
272 pages
6h 29m
English
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Chapter 5. The Other Road Ahead
In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I decided to start a startup. The PR campaign leading up to Netscape’s IPO was running full blast then, and there was a lot of talk in the press about online commerce. At the time there might have been thirty actual stores on the Web, all made by hand. If there were going to be a lot of online stores, there would need to be software for making them, so we decided to write some.
For the first week or so we intended to make this an ordinary desktop application. Then one day we had the idea of making the software run on our web server, using the browser as an interface. We tried rewriting the software to work over the Web, and it was clear that this was the way to go. If we wrote our software to run on the server, it would be a lot easier for the users and for us as well.
This turned out to be a good plan. Now, as Yahoo Store, this software is the most popular online store builder, with over 20,000 users.
When we started Viaweb, hardly anyone understood what we meant when we said that the software ran on the server. It was not until Hotmail was launched a year later that people started to get it. Now everyone knows that this is a valid approach. There is a name now for what we were: an Application Service Provider, or ASP.
I think a lot of the next generation of software will be written on this model. Even Microsoft, who have the most to lose, seem to see the inevitability of moving some things off the desktop. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.