The History

In 1995, Allaire released the first version of ColdFusion, version 1.0. This release of ColdFusion was a distant cousin to the ColdFusion that we all know and love today. Although ColdFusion MX has evolved from ColdFusion 1.0, the changes in ColdFusion over the years have been quite dramatic.

In version 1.0, ColdFusion provided web developers with a simplified way of connecting their web sites to a database backend, enabling them to allow users of their web sites to interact with their databases. Although this seems like a basic concept today, back in 1995 the web was really just beginning to take off, and the ideas ColdFusion 1.0 brought to the market were really quite revolutionary.

With each successive release of ColdFusion, Allaire increased out-of-the-box functionality by offering extensions and enhancements to the tag and function libraries included with the server. By the time ColdFusion 4.5 was released, the development community had already offered thousands of additional user-written custom tags to enhance ColdFusion Server's capabilities.

In March 2000, Macromedia and Allaire completed a merger, and shortly afterward ColdFusion 5 was released. This was the first release of ColdFusion under the Macromedia moniker. With version 5, ColdFusion enabled the community to further extend the server by creating user-defined functions (UDFs). Version 5 also provided excellent and continued support for ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), C++, and Java-based custom tags. Performance with version 5 was enhanced through the inclusion of the "query a query" feature, as well as by enhanced server-monitoring tools that enabled system admins on all levels to keep a closer eye on their servers.