A Brief History of ColdFusion

by Robert Marks

In the summer of 1995, a one-man operation released a remarkable new product. It was named ColdFusion 1.0, and was designed to help HTML programmers create database-oriented Web applications.

"[It] was very early in the history of the Web," recalls Adam Berrey, one of the founders of the modern-day Allaire. "The vast majority of sites being built were static HTML. What little interactivity that was available was provided through simple CGI scripts."

ColdFusion 1.0 and the later version 1.5 were very simple programs. Their primary feature was database connectivity, through a primitive tag-based script called "Database Markup Language" (DBML). Creating version 1.5 was a fairly dramatic improvement, however; it introduced system service architecture and e-mail integration, and allowed compatibility with C++ for coding extensions. But since it was the first in a new field, ColdFusion soon faced stiff competition from Microsoft."Microsoft ASP was created by a team of developers who were Allaire competitors acquired by Microsoft," Berrey notes. "They had a competing product called DBWeb that was largely a failure in the marketplace, but they were working on a new technology in 1996, called i-Basic, which eventually became ASP."

But ColdFusion made a great leap forward with version 2.0, which included such advances as 150 new functions, support for new protocols (e.g. POP), looping, variables, typeless expression evaluation, and a number of other language enhancements. These enhancements would prove to be just the beginning; 1997 also saw the addition of custom tags, server side tags, a search and indexing system for text, and ColdFusion Studio.

In January 1998, ColdFusion 3.1 was released with a host of new features. It offered greater support for Windows NT and Sun Solaris systems, and also featured automated page generation and tag completion. A built-in page preview window and HTML syntax checker rounded out the product, keeping it at the top of the market. In early 1999, ColdFusion tackled the enterprise market. With enhanced security and a new multi-threading service, version 4.0 managed to present a product capable of producing applications for multiple servers.

"From day one, ColdFusion's competitive edge has been ease-of-use," Berrey observes. "At the time it was first released, ColdFusion was really the only way to easily build robust, database-based web applications. It continues to offer unparalleled ease-of-use and productivity, along with a great deal more power and flexibility."

But regardless of modern ColdFusion's many selling points, Berrey maintains that there is still more work to be done. "We're constantly pushing to make ColdFusion better. We have two releases planned this year: first, a new version on the existing architecture, ColdFusion 5.0, which will add some powerful new features such as dynamic graphing and user-defined functions. Then we plan to release a next-generation architecture that will allow developers to deploy their ColdFusion applications on a J2EE server."

With so much to come, Allaire continues to maintain the same bottom line that it started with, back in 1995. "I know that everyone says this, but really, user-driven design has been at the center of every release of ColdFusion," Berrey says, proudly. "We've tried to take complex technologies and make them accessible to a broad range of developers."