4 ms·

As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and in particular the first "Application Server".

by harel 6y ago

prepend 6y ago
PHP templated before CF (94 v 95), but I feel like the concept was around long before. I’m not sure what you mean by “application server” but there were in memory modules for web servers earlier than CF (eg, CGI). I think CF was around before ASP, Java, and JSP. But it always seemed like a commercial version of PHP to me. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of application servers [0] there’s quite a few older than CF (Tuxedo in 1983, Maybe CF was the first to be web specific? They were windows only so they can’t be that old. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers
- harel 6y ago
  Maybe "First web specific application server" in the sense of a server specifically serving dynamic HTML output over the web" is better? I'm not vouching for the accuracy of this statement.
  - prepend 6y ago
    Maybe “first sold” as the CGI spec in C came out in 1993 [0]. But this seems more of a marketing spin as PHP was out earlier and was the first, I know of, to have that easy “scripts in a folder that are interpreted by the http server” thing going where there was no compile process needed. My memory of the time was that CF was one of the many commercial web software companies that were selling to companies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
wahern 6y ago
> As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and in particular the first "Application Server". Especially true for Windows. Interest in commercial web development exploded at a time when Windows NT still held a dominate position in the emerging small- and medium-sized business markets. Perl bootstrapped web development in the Unix world, but Windows didn't have anything like the Unix software ecosystem--Perl, Apache, mod_php, etc. ColdFusion was where it was at for dynamic page generation in the Windows world. (I was only ever a visitor in that world. I had originally discovered programming thanks to Slackware Linux and Perl.) In the beginning ColdFusion was all Windows, IIRC, with Solaris and Linux ports coming about the time ColdFusion seemed to peak. ColdFusion programmers also tended to use Allaire's HomeSite, one of the first web-oriented IDEs. Allaire being the creator of ColdFusion.

As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and in particular the first "Application Server".

by harel 6y ago

As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and in particular the first "Application Server".

PHP templated before CF (94 v 95), but I feel like the concept was around long before. I’m not sure what you mean by “application server” but there were in memory modules for web servers earlier than CF (eg, CGI). I think CF was around before ASP, Java, and JSP. But it always seemed like a commercial version of PHP to me. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of application servers [0] there’s quite a few older than CF (Tuxedo in 1983, Maybe CF was the first to be web specific? They were windows only so they can’t be that old. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_application_servers

harel 6y ago
Maybe "First web specific application server" in the sense of a server specifically serving dynamic HTML output over the web" is better? I'm not vouching for the accuracy of this statement.
- prepend 6y ago
  Maybe “first sold” as the CGI spec in C came out in 1993 [0]. But this seems more of a marketing spin as PHP was out earlier and was the first, I know of, to have that easy “scripts in a folder that are interpreted by the http server” thing going where there was no compile process needed. My memory of the time was that CF was one of the many commercial web software companies that were selling to companies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

wahern 6y ago

> As far as I'm aware ColdFusion is a bunch of "firsts" and in particular the first "Application Server". Especially true for Windows. Interest in commercial web development exploded at a time when Windows NT still held a dominate position in the emerging small- and medium-sized business markets. Perl bootstrapped web development in the Unix world, but Windows didn't have anything like the Unix software ecosystem--Perl, Apache, mod_php, etc. ColdFusion was where it was at for dynamic page generation in the Windows world. (I was only ever a visitor in that world. I had originally discovered programming thanks to Slackware Linux and Perl.) In the beginning ColdFusion was all Windows, IIRC, with Solaris and Linux ports coming about the time ColdFusion seemed to peak. ColdFusion programmers also tended to use Allaire's HomeSite, one of the first web-oriented IDEs. Allaire being the creator of ColdFusion.