== Examples of AJAX

Most (all) of these examples date from 2005-2009.

This was the window of time where cross-browser responsive web applications first became possible.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 6 had displaced the older versions, and was ... not terrible.
Of course, non-Microsoft web browsers were more standards-compliant, but MS IE was close enough.

AJAX was the term used at the time for this new form of web-based applications.

In this period I wrote and discarded a series of experiments to solve aspects of rich applications.
In this time jQuery (and others) emerged, but were not more functional.

Did ship a web application that replaced and improved upon a Windows application.

For those into software-trivia, the desktop application was "Monarch" and has a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_(software)

The company I was at had a (late-1990s vintage) web application "Report.Web" (no notion if still exists).
Report.Web used Monarch to define templates for extracting data from "printed" reports.

Originally Report.Web used components from Monarch for back-end publishing, but they were slow.
I reverse-engineered their templates, and wrote a back-end engine that was 300x faster.

The above is not a typo. :)

The then-parent company of Monarch wanted our market, so they refused to allow us licenses.
So I wrote a web-based application to replace Monarch - which was a large lift.
The stack was HTML/JS on the front-end, Java/Tomcat as the web service, and C++ on the back-end.

Later work did not call for rich front-ends, so this is my last example of such.


Oh. The Sudoku solver was just for fun. For my daughter's homework, one day. :)