ColdFusion is a commercial, rapid application development platform invented by Jeremy and JJ Allaire. The product made its debut around 1995, leading the way for similar products from Microsoft and another from the open source community named Bluefish. The major difference between ColdFusion and the other WYSIWYG development tools of the time was ColdFusion's ability to interface with a database. This enabled people who would likely have trouble creating a dynamic website to create a dynamic site with remarkable ease.

One of the distinguishing features of ColdFusion is its associated scripting language, ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML), which compares to the scripting components of ASP, JSP, and PHP in purpose and features, but more closely resembles HTML in syntax. "ColdFusion" is often used synonymously with "CFML", but there are additional CFML application servers besides ColdFusion, and ColdFusion supports programming languages other than CFML, such as server-side Actionscript and embedded scripts that can be written in a JavaScript-like language known as CFScript.

Originally a product of Allaire and released in July 1995, ColdFusion was developed by brothers Joseph JJ and Jeremy Allaire. In 2001 Allaire was acquired by Macromedia, who in turn were acquired by Adobe Systems Inc in 2005.

ColdFusion is most often used for data-driven web sites or intranets, but can also be used to generate remote services such as SOAP web services or Flash remoting. It is especially well-suited as the server-side technology to the client-side Flex.

ColdFusion can also handle asynchronous events such as SMS and instant messaging via its gateway interface, available in ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise Edition.

ColdFusion MX

Prior to 2000, Allaire began a project codenamed "Neo". This project was later revealed as a ColdFusion Server re-written completely using Java. This made portability easier and provided a layer of security on the server, because it ran inside a Java Runtime Environment. Senior software engineer Damon Cooper, still with Adobe, was the major initiator of the Java move.

On January 16, 2001, Allaire announced a pending merger with Macromedia. Macromedia continued its development and released the product under the name ColdFusion 5.0. It retained the name "ColdFusion" through the remainder of version 5 releases. In June 2002 Macromedia released the product under a slightly different name, allowing the product to be associated with the Macromedia brand, as well as the brand that the Allaire brothers had given it, originally: ColdFusion MX (6.0). ColdFusion MX was completely rebuilt from the ground up and was based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. ColdFusion MX was also designed to integrate well with Macromedia Flash using Flash Remoting.

With the release of ColdFusion MX, the CFML language API was released with an OOP interface.

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