Platform · 1995–2015 · Web Boom
ColdFusion
Tag-based rapid web apps in CFML. Government and agency sites that outlived every contractor who knew the syntax.
ColdFusion faded from mindshare while legacy installs kept serving forms and reports. It lost to PHP and .NET on cost and to modern stacks on talent pools. The costly part is the specialist rate when the DMV portal breaks on a holiday.
Context
The browser ate the desktop
The web became the default delivery surface. LAMP and Rails made shipping cheap; Ajax made pages feel like apps; SOAP/SOA tried to enterprise-ify the wire. REST won by being debuggable with curl. This decade invented the modern product cadence — and the habit of treating every new framework as destiny.
Compare with
Related
Language · 1995–now
PHP
Dismissed by snobs, powering WordPress and half the web. Ugly pragmatism beats elegant irrelevance.
Architecture · 1998–now
LAMP
Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — the cheap, fast path to a website. Mutated into countless managed stacks.
Language · 1998–2010
Visual Basic 6
Drag-and-drop business logic that powered SMB back offices worldwide. Microsoft killed it; the apps refused to die.