AOLServer was great! I used it for a ton of stuff, the most complex being a marketplace for data. It was almost trivially easy to do fast, maintainable, programmable business logic as part of a complex web site. Having to switch over to the likes of Flask on Apache (not that Flask isn't a decent framework) was a major step back for development, testing and maintenance.

What sorts of things did these tools do?

I'm obviously aware you can't be precisely specific, but I imagine that the level of detail you _can_ share is probably still very interesting.