The following are my thoughts as to who stands out as the key contributors and their endeavors will speak for themselves. They are most certainly the people that are influencing our technology with their ideas and technologies today. They are in no particular order of importance because they are all having contributed largely to the World Wide Web as we now are experiencing it.

 

Jonathan Gay – he is the co founder for Futurewave Software and was the main programmer and the visionary behind flash. Adobe Flash isn’t everyone favorite program however it was in. He eventually became the Vice president of Engineering at Macromedia and has led his team to new heights for flash as in Actionscript. With his knowledge in technology he spearheaded and created what we now know call Flash Media Server. This is allows flash player to use RTMP protocols to stream audio and video, with out it we would not have there would be no YouTube to be what it has become today.

 

Brian Behlendorf – the primary developer of the Apache Web Server and is the founding member of the Apache Group. His Apache Project rewrote and re-optimized the entire codebase from the original NCSA server. Apache is free and has an open source nature and the intension was it was built to be extensible. Bottom line this means that ISP’s could easily add their own extension or plug-ins to allow for optimization of the server. To this day Apache is one of the more popular web servers on the internet.

 

Brad Fitzpatrick - he is the creator of Live Journal. Believe it or not he created Live Journal while still in college as a way for his friends and himself to keep each other up to date on what they were doing. It has now grown beyond his dreams into a larger blogging community and as it grows the additional features were added such as friends lists, user polls, blog clients and the now popular post by phone or email. The now major communities that stemmed from this technology are Facebook, MySpace and Word Press. As this grew and began to use more resources Fitzpatrick started the memcached project to speed up web applications and alleviate database load.

 

Time Berners-Lee – is the inventor of the World Wide Web, the first serve and HTML. He currently resides as the founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, the people that oversee the development of the web as a whole. Even the though the internet does date back to 1969 he was able to bring the concept of the internet and hypertext which has set the foundation for the internet as we now know it.

 

Marc Andreessen – he is the co-authored Mosaic which was the first widely used web browser and he then moved forward and created Netscape Communications. Mosaic was not the first graphical web browser but it was the first to be gamer significant. It also had the first ability for its browser to display images inline and with text. Netscape had some significant projects such as the Netscape Navigator which had a huge impact for us to bring the web to mainstream users. Also with that came Netscape Communicator this became now know as Mozilla the basis for what we know as Firefox.

 

Brendan Eich – He is the creator of JavaScript and is the CTO of Mozilla Corporation. He created JavaScript while under Netscape. JavaScript has quickly become one of the more popular web programming languages. As it progressed JavaScript created libraries and frameworks and coupled with Ajax has made it an integral part of the standard for based web.

 

John Resig – He is the creator and lead developer of jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library on the web. The goal of jQuery is to be compatible across the web browsers. This sets it apart from all others. It is very popular due to its UI toolkit which is popular with enterprise application development.

 

Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutamans and Zeev Suraski – they are responsible for what we now know as PHP the scripting language that is most used for web languages for creating those very dynamic web pages you see. The group rewrote the parse and created what is known as PHP3. They went on to create PHP 4 which was they rewrote the core of PHP which was proudly named the Zend Engine. From Zend Engine they founded Zend Technologies which continues to develop PHP.