ColdFusion Markup Language - History

History

ColdFusion was originally created by the Allaire Corporation, originally located in Minnesota but later moving to Cambridge, MA and finally Newton, MA. Allaire was acquired by Macromedia in 2001, thus Allaire Cold Fusion became Macromedia Cold Fusion (the space was removed from the product name with the release of ColdFusion version 4). Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005 and is still actively developing ColdFusion.

In 1998 Alan Williamson and his Scottish company n-ary began creating a templating engine for Java to simplify common programming tasks. Williamson was using curly-brace notation instead of tags, but when he saw an example of CFML and how it was solving similar problems (although not in Java) using a tag syntax, he started developing what would eventually become BlueDragon, which was the first Java implementation of the CFML language. (ColdFusion was written in C and C++ until version 6.0--the first Java-based version of ColdFusion—was released in 2002.) New Atlanta licensed BlueDragon around 2001 and made it available as a commercial product, eventually creating a .NET implementation of CFML. Open BlueDragon is a fork of the commercial BlueDragon product and was first released in 2008.

The Railo CFML engine began as a student project in 2002 and was first launched as a commercial project in 2005. Railo announced they were making the engine open source in 2008, and the first open source version was released in 2009.

On June 18, 2009, Adobe announced at the CFUnited conference that it had formed a CFML Advisory Committee that would be responsible for guiding and reviewing changes to the CFML language. This effort was disbanded in 2010. The Google Group CFML Conventional Wisdom was created as a forum for open, public discussions about language and engine features.