On June 15 Allaire announced that it intended to acquire Live Software, makers of JRun, the leading server-side Java development and deployment server. With this acquisition Allaire also announced a broader strategy for embracing Java on the server, extending its leading Web application platform with a huge customer base and technology platform, and setting the stage for an integrated application server platform that combines the dominant tag-based rapid development model (CFML) with the dominant server-side object-oriented system programming language, Java. These perfect cousins will form a critical foundation for the Allaire platform.

For Live Software and JRun, this means that their product and technology will be propelled through the Allaire channel and customer base. As a small, independent company, Live Software had achieved incredible success (not unlike the early days of Allaire), having built a base of about 80,000 developers who use the product, becoming the dominant Java Servlet/JSP vendor. With Allaire, JRun can gain the infrastructure needed to be adopted as a standard for server-side Java in enterprises worldwide. Additionally, the JRun team, headed by founder Paul Colton, will help Allaire as we evolve our platform overall.

The Application Server Market: A Short History
Many of you may remember the days of ColdFusion 1.0, which Allaire delivered in the summer of 1995. One of the first commercial Web application development products, ColdFusion quickly achieved dramatic success because of its simplicity, which was achieved through the invention of CFML (then called DBML), which provided a tag-based server-scripting model that tightly integrated with HTML pages. ColdFusion defined page-based dynamic Web applications.

By the fall of 1995 several other companies had emerged with competing products, such as Spider and DBWeb, which took very different approaches to Web applications. Essentially, they provided developers with a simple user interface to define form and report pages. Code was generated, and that was your application. While at face value it was very easy, this model severely limited the flexibility of what could be built.

In 1996 these companies took very different directions and approaches to the market, unlike Allaire,which continued to focus on its core platform, ColdFusion. In early 1996 the folks who made DBWeb, Aspect Software, went into beta on a product that was their "ColdFusion Killer."

At the same time, Spider technologies embarked on the Java path. Java had emerged in 1995 - and was heralded as the next generation of the Web, where applets and Java clients would replace the Web. Spider's approach was different, however. They focused instead on building server-side Web applications using Java. Late in 1996 their company, renamed NetDynamics, pioneered the use of Java on the server, launching the Java application server marketplace.

Within a year well over a dozen companies moved to enter this marketplace, each vendor taking a completely different approach to how your Java code connected to the Web.

In mid-1997 it was becoming increasingly clear to the world that Java in the browser was not going to fly. Recognizing this, Sun tried to push Java as a standard model for developing Web applications. Pushing the concept of servlets, Sun released the Servlet API and provided a standard way to connect Java code to a Web server.

The importance of this was that there was the potential to standardize how server-side Java applications were built and deployed.

At the very same time, Paul Colton saw the power of Java on the server and developed and released JRun, the first commercial server for running servlets on any Web server and any platform.

By this time the Web application server marketplace was heating up. Multiple Java application server vendors were jockeying to have the "best" model for implementing Java on the server. Simultaneously, Allaire was plugging away at ColdFusion, defining rapid and productivity-focused Web application development and deployment and expanding its focus to cover more of the Web application server market requirements.

Also at this time Paul Colton and the JRun crew were plugging along, and realized that servlets alone weren't enough to make Java on the server a smash hit. Paul looked at the success of ColdFusion and ASP, and saw that a successful model needed to embrace pages and templates as a way to separate presentation and application logic. Seeing that Java on the server needed an equivalent model, he implemented the technology that would later be standardized by IBM and Sun as JavaServer Pages.

Consolidation continued in the application server market in early 1998, with Sun buying NetDynamics and IBM moving to release WebSphere Application Server. In the background, however, was Live Software, which essentially was giving away its product and building a massive community of developers building with Java Servlets and JSP. In fact, the day that IBM and Sun announced the intention to create a specification for JSP, Live Software announced it was shipping a commercial product that supported it!

Like Allaire and ColdFusion, Live Software successfully used the Web to market and deliver a powerful and usable platform to a broad base of developers. By listening to customers and relentlessly pushing the technology forward, Live Software has achieved dominant market share for Java server technology.

With the Allaire acquisition of Live Software, Allaire is now the purveyor of two of the leading models for delivering Web applications. Not only are we the leaders, but we're the pioneers in both arenas.

ColdFusion and Java: Perfect Cousins
Developers, naturally, will ask and want to understand how ColdFusion and Java will come together to support an overall platform. In acquiring Live Software, Allaire believed it could not only propel itself into a leadership position in the Java server space, but that we could also bring together two of the dominant language models that have driven the Web platform in recent years.

Indeed, it's our belief that ColdFusion and Java are perfect cousins.

Stepping back and looking at broader trends in application platforms, it's clear that successful platforms need to do two primary things. First, they need to provide the core set of services that all applications require. In the Web platform landscape this includes things like session management, security, clustering, connectivity and messaging integration. Second, a platform needs to be able to support a broad range of developers and project profiles built on that platform. In the world of the Windows platform, we saw that Windows provided a common platform for applications, accessible to a broad range of developers using everything from Access, Visual Basic and PowerBuilder to C and C++.

None is "better" than the other, but rather exposes capabilities based on class of developer and project.

Likewise, we believe that in the Web application platform marketplace there is a range of developers spanning business users, HTML developers, RAD developers using CFML and JavaScript, and system programmers building in Java. In fact, all of these need to work together in a common fashion, and integrate into core services provided by the application server platform.

Interestingly, both Allaire and Live Software were heading in this direction. With CFX_J, Allaire demonstrated its first effort to bring Java and ColdFusion together more directly. Live Software, simultaneously, had developed something called Taglets, which allows developers to build custom tags using servlets, running on JRun. From this they derived <CF_Anywhere>, a light version of CFML built on Java. With the latest release of JRun we've included something called <CF_Servlet>, which allows you to extend ColdFusion using servlets and JRun. As you can imagine, there will be a lot more of this coming out of Allaire in the future!

The important thing to realize here is that the marriage of ColdFusion and Java is a huge win for the Allaire Web application platform and for our broad developer community (now numbering over 300,000!), and that the acquisition of Live Software by Allaire will help ensure that Allaire continues to be the pioneer in Web application platforms.