Hacker News Reader

Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Thing is this seems to completely ignore certain things - ASP.NET did not come out for a while - for a long time PHP (or, god forbid ASP) was the "reference architecture" - PHP3 was released in the late nineties, with 4 not long after. Django also came along time before Rails and did all that full-stack stuff.

View on HN

If you want to get picky about things being ignored, enterprise "full stack" in late 90's generally meant Cold Fusion, and large apps leveraged cfscript (or for performance, cfx modules) for MVC style separation of templates/code/data. CF came with scaffolding of sorts as well, through a wizard that could generate data drill down and editing CFML for your DB.

PHP and ColdFusion were both emerging already in 1995, with ColdFusion quickly becoming the RAD (e.g., user authentication, authorization, and session management, caching, etc baked in) full stack commercial license platform, and PHP becoming the OSS "some assembly required" choice for those not interested in assembling everything from bits of CPAN.

Speaking of '95, don't forget EveryWare's Tango, giving Windows NT/95, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, SGI IRIX, and Apple Macintosh users a drag'n'drop web application framework:

"There are two components to Tango: the Tango Editor and the Tango Application Server. The Tango Editor is an application that allows Webmasters to develop dynamic Web sites in a drag-and-drop interface, the Tango Application Server is an application that executes the documents created in the editor."

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/New+WebSTAR+Plug-In+Version+of...

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/EveryWare's+Tango+3.1+Allows+I...

(A lot of stuff from that era is not on Wikipedia.)

There certainly is kind of a weird jump from CGI to ASP.NET for sure. First that the prior was the early 'nix way, while the latter is a later entrant of the Microsoft way.

I feel like the LAMP stack kind of pushed out CGI more than anything else did in unix, while there were a lot of varied options on Microsoft - roll-your-own COM (ew), ColdFusion and a bunch of other various commercial offerings, ASP (not .NET, but the first one built on vbscript). And then all of the Java variations have their own distinct platform-independent(ish) lineage...

Hmm, maybe it'd be fun to write a well-researched history of modern web platforms. Wait, did I really just say I wanted to write about history? I am getting old...

Django was released a year after Rails.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com