I don’t think it’s fair to give credit to CF for templating. In that I think we’d have the exact use of templating today if CF never existed, due to the other templating approaches that existed before CF.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, CF was hardly the first to provide a templating framework for output generation. But ColdFusion's competitive advantage was how it seamlessly integrated database access, in particular SQL SELECTs and INSERTs, into HTML-based template looping and HTML forms. For a ridiculous number of applications, especially business applications, that's all anybody really needs. It was abstract enough to support many kinds of data sources (e.g. CSV files), which IIRC was one of the most common ways to extend the engine. And it was simple enough that even people who struggled jumping from HTML to a proper programming language could crank out useful applications, especially if someone provided them a SQL query to copy+paste.
Years later C# would be lauded for LINQ, which provided for C# what ColdFusion provided to markup transformations.
These sorts of language integrations weren't new, either. Years later I would discover and dabble with Perl's format framework: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlform. I had actually learned Perl a few years before I was introduced to ColdFusion, though I don't think many Perl programmers were ever familiar with formats. (It is rather frustrating for modern uses.) And while I didn't make the connection at the time, I believe some older languages (Fortran? SPSS?) which I was briefly introduced to in college supported similar language-integrated data source and record processing capabilities, though like Perl formats they were designed for tabular text output.
But this history only emphasizes how important of a competitive advantage this was for ColdFusion, which was completely squandered.
Regarding the discussion of PHP elsethread, about a year after taking over maintenance of a ColdFusion website (where I was first introduced to ColdFusion), I advocated for and was allowed to migrate the site to PHP. That was about the time PHP made the switch from Perl (PHP 2) to C (PHP 3). Before then I actually didn't even know PHP existed, despite being an avid Linux and Perl user. At the time I was convinced ColdFusion sucked. It was only later in my career that I slowly began to appreciate what ColdFusion brought to the table technologically.
