Quite some years ago, I worked at a cool startup company towards the tail of the Dot Com bubble. I won't mention it here I guess. But - they were pioneers in Mobile Apps.
They promised this "write once run anywhere" concept, where you would write your app in a proprietary markup language, and they would parse this markup and render the content on a host of early devices. The field for competing devices in these days was insane, including stuff like Palm Pilots to VERY early mobile phone browsers that ran their own simplistic markup (phones in those days had no resources to the markups had to be dumbed down and simplified).
Anyway, we split the development up into "tiers" where we had "front end" developers who were super knowledgeable in how to render content, and then we had the "back end" developers who wrote the server logic (really it was 3 Tier, so business logic and database logic). Most of the stuff was written in Java, and these guys had licensed WebLogic application servers, and were using EJBs (which were a hot technology at the time). They even used Entity Beans, which practically nobody used (most shops had gone with a stateless architecture and used Session Beans). WebLogic was cool, admittedly, and introduced me to Connection Pools for databases, Threads, etc. These concepts are widely used today.
As cool as WebLogic was, it was not my first exposure to an Application Server. I was the first one in a large Telco company to bring in an Application Server (I worked in an Innovation Center back then). I contracted in for a Time Keeping system from a Silicon Valley company (Tock I think it was called), which we customized, and this system was architected for Netscape Application Server - which I believe was indeed the first "application server". Feel free to comment if anyone has a correction to this belief.
Anyway, I digress. But these technologies, if they didn't outright invent it, they lent themselves well to the concept of 3 Tier application design as we know it today. Which allowed your web front ends to be developed in a compartmentalized fashion.
I never really worked much on GUIs and Web Front Ends. I did a little bit "here and there". Websphere pages (later on). The Java Spring framework. I created a website for a small consulting company we owned back at one point. But aside of brief stints with user interfaces, the focus was never really web front-ends.
I am realizing that I need to "bone up" a bit. My next post will explain why.
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