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"Enterprise-grade" software means long term support. This 1997 article from the Chicago Tribune shows how LiveWire started to lag behind the competition, a year after its launch. Netscape didn't necessarily invest as much as its competitors, and LiveWire quickly lagged behind in terms of features.Allen Wyke from 1999 is a good example of how, even a few years later, JavaScript had to be advocated for. It still had to prove itself, and hadn't yet become popular enough to have a large pool of developers and libraries available. JavaScript was a very young language at the time.LiveWire's direct competitor, Microsoft ASP, didn't require a compilation step. This review of LiveWire's development cycle by Philip Greenspun describes these woes in great detail. Having to compile and bundle everything, including HTML content, made for a somewhat cumbersome developer experience.While it is hard to pinpoint a single reason why that was the case, here are a few clues, in no particular order: LiveWire was a very interesting and innovative piece of software, but never came come close to becoming the gold standard of "professional" server-side development of the late nineties. Netscape's server-side JavaScript implementation also came with APIs for session management, forms processing, filesystem access, and even sending emails in later versions, which made of LiveWire a seemingly complete and viable solution for backend development. There was for example a clear focus on database connectivity, interoperability with Java classes and native libraries (LiveConnect and jsacca), all of which making it easier for potential clients to integrate LiveWire into their existing infrastructure and codebases, at least in theory. LiveWire was built for "enterprise" customers, and some of the architectural decisions that were made could be explained by this constraint. A locking mechanism was available, but not automatically enforced. Shared objects could be accessed and modified by any thread, which made it easy to share state between clients but also came with important risks. Netscape's runtime was multi-threaded and allowed for sharing objects between threads of a given application. A global write() function was used conjointly to "print" content on the page.Įnter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode LiveWire introduced a tag, the likes of ASP's <% and PHP's constituted an important part of Netscape's business model, and something Microsoft invested in as part of their newfound interest for the internet.
NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR 2 FREE
While Netscape and Microsoft were distributing their browser free of charge, both companies were also in the business of selling enterprise-level software to companies and institutions looking for a "one stop shop" solution to their web server and web development needs.
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Today we're going to have a look at Netscape LiveWire, an extension of "Netscape Enterprise Server" that made writing server-side JavaScript applications possible more than 10 years before it was cool. We are at the very beginning of what would become "The First Browser War": how JavaScript evolved and grew in that context is a story often told, but did you know that JavaScript was also used as a server-side scripting language as early as 1996? JavaScript is less than a year old, making its grand public debut with the release of Netscape Navigator 2.0 to a both intrigued and somewhat bewildered web development community.