Working with remote data

In the realm of web development, the journey of fetching data from servers has seen remarkable transformations. In the early 90s, the web’s infancy with HTTP 1.0 marked the beginning of server communication. Web pages were static, and HTTP requests were basic, fetching whole pages or static assets. Every request meant establishing a new connection, and interactivity was minimal, mostly limited to HTML forms. Security was also basic, reflecting the nascent state of the web.

The turn of the millennium witnessed a significant shift with the rise of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX). This brought an era of enhanced interactivity, allowing web applications to communicate with the server in the background without reloading the whole page. It was powered by the XMLHttpRequest object. Here’s a simple example of using XMLHttpRequest to fetch data:

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {
  if (xhr.readyState ...