10 founding fathers of the web
Although the phrase “founding fathers” is often used in conjunction with people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, we would like to think about this expression on a global level.And what is more global than the World Wide Web?
So we will try to consider 10 individuals who have played an important role in shaping the World Wide Web and Internet culture.
1. Tim Berners-Lee
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Tim Berners-Lee is considered the inventor of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee and his team created the world's first browser — WorldWideWeb, the first web server and HTML hypertext markup language.
Berners-Lee founded and now leads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that develops and implements technology standards for the World Wide Web. Although the emergence of the Internet itself dates back to 1969, it was Berners-Lee who was able to combine the concepts of the Internet and hypertext, and also lay the foundation for the Internet in the form we know it today.
Since CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) did not make the World Wide Web proprietary, the global hypertext project was approved and implemented.
2. Marc Andressen
Mark Andreessen is known as a co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used browser. He also founded Netscape Communications.
Although Mosaic was not the first graphical browser, it was the first to be widely known. In addition, it was the first browser to display images with text.
After the development of Mosaic, Andreessen co-founded Netscape Communications. The company's flagship product, Netscape Navigator, had a tremendous impact helping to attract regular users to the web. In 1998, Netscape announced that the project would be developed within the open source community. This project, known as Mozilla, became the basis of what we now know as Firefox.
3. Brian Belendorf
Brian Belendorf was the main developer of the Apache web server and one of the founding members of the Apache Group. During the development of the Hotwired project - a site for Wired magazine - he was faced with the fact that the most used web server software (developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign) could not cope with the user registration system. Therefore, Belendorf created a patch to support the requirements of HotWired. It turned out that not one Belendorf was busy correcting the NCSA code at that time, so he put together an electronic mailing list to coordinate the work of other programmers.
By February 1995, the project was named Apache, the NCSA server code was rewritten and optimized. Apache genius is not only in its free and open, but also in the fact that it supports modularity. This means that providers can easily add their own extensions and plug-ins for optimization, which allows hosting hundreds of sites on one server. Apache is still the most popular web server.
4, 5, 6. Rasmus Lerdorf, Andy Gutmans and Ziv Sourasky
Lerdorf, Gutmans and Surasky are responsible for knowing how PHP is a scripting language that remains one of the most commonly used languages for creating dynamic web pages. Rasmus Lerdorf created the first version of PHP in 1995, and he was the main developer of this project during the first two versions.
In 1997, Gutmans and Suraski decided to expand PHP by rewriting the parser and creating what became known as PHP 3. They continued to rewrite the PHP core, naming it Zend Engine and releasing PHP 4 based on it. Later, Gutmans and Suraski founded still greatly affect the development of PHP.
Although Perl Larry Walla was one of the first general-purpose scripting languages, the ease of use and PHP embed de facto made it play the role of the letter P in the acronym LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
7. Brad Fitzpatrick
Brad Fitzpatrick is known as the creator of LiveJournal, the first author of memcached and the original OpenID authentication protocol.
Fitzpatrick developed LiveJournal, while studying at the university, to keep his personal diary. LJ has become a large blogging community and has acquired many unique features such as friend lists, the ability to create user polls, support for blog clients, the ability to send text messages to users, the ability to send messages by phone and email, create groups of friends and much more. which then became a standard part of such communities as Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace, WordPress.com and Posterous today.
LiveJournal developed and began to consume more and more resources. Fitzpatrick began developing a memcached project to speed up dynamic web applications and ease the load on databases. It does this by consolidating free memory across the entire web server, and then transferring it as needed. memcached is used on Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, Craigslist, and many other projects.
8. Brendan Ike
Brendan Ike created JavaScript and currently works as a technical director at Mozilla Corporation. Ike created JavaScript by working in Netscape, first under the name Mocha, then under the name LiveScript, and finally JavaScript. JavaScript was officially released in December 1995.
JavaScript quickly became one of the most popular web programming languages, even considering that it was first used for visually unaesthetic solutions. However, as time went on, the emergence of JavaScript libraries and frameworks combined with the power of AJAX made JavaScript part of the standards of the Internet.
9. John Resig
John Resig is the creator and lead developer of jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library on the web. Although other JavaScript libraries existed before jQuery, the goal of jQuery being compatible across all browsers really distinguishes it.
Especially in the past two years, the popularity of jQuery has increased dramatically, and currently it is used by 31% of the 10,000 most visited sites. JQuery extensibility and tooling has also made it popular in the commercial sector.
JavaScript is still one of the biggest forces behind the standards of the Internet, and jQuery only helps hold that position.
10. Jonathan Gay
Jonathan Gay was one of the founders of FutureWave Software and for more than a decade was the main Flash programmer.
Although not everyone is a fan of Adobe Flash, it is important to remember how influential this technology has been over the past 15 years. Jonathan Gay wrote the vector graphics editor SmartSketch back in 1993 for the PenPoint operating system, and after PenPoint was discontinued, SmartSketch technology was redirected to create animations that could be played on web pages.
This product, FutureSplash Animator, was acquired by Macromedia in 1996 and renamed to Flash. After that, Jonathan Gay became vice president of development at Macromedia and led the Flash team. Over the years, his team has implemented new elements of Flash - for example, ActionScript.
However, perhaps the pinnacle of Jonathan Gay’s achievements was that he initiated the creation of what was then known as Flash Communication Server (now Flash Media Server), which allows Flash Player to use the RTMP protocol for streaming audio and video over the web. In essence, this technology has allowed YouTube to be YouTube.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/98331/
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