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Facebook May Have Once Used Coldfusion

10 points by cutler ↗ HN
Although Facebook is commonly identified as a PHP site there exists an archived version of Facebook's home page built with Coldfusion: https://web.archive.org/web/20120620044923/http://www.facebook.com/index.cfm . Ph.D researcher and Coldfusion consultant Karl Simanonok also remembers seeing index.cfm in the address bar when analysing an early version of Facebook around late 2004/early 2005 and recognised use of the Fusebox framework which he had used in his consulting work.

10 comments

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densone
I am not sure about this but am 100% MySpace used cold fusion on login.
Raed667
I watched a documentary about MySpace a while back and at some point the majority of their code was ColdFusion.

The initial proof-of-concept was coded in around 10 days and then they got stuck with it for a while until they moved to .NET ~2005

nickclaw
Does everyone else see a 404 page at the archive.org link? That's the same thing you get today when you try to access /index.cfm so I don't see how this is any evidence of Facebook using Coldfusion.
cutler
The page contains a "This content is currently unavailable" notice but the fact that it's been archived as index.cfm suggests there was once a Coldfusion page containing content. One complicating factor is that, although I don't know Coldfusion intimately, I understand index.cfm often operates the way index.php does in older PHP frameworks, ie. as the root of a query string for all the routes in the site.
nickclaw
The archive.org entry for 2012 is orange, indicating it was a 404 back when it was archived. There's also archived pages for /index.php that resolve successfully all the way back to 2005. Maybe someone just manually asked archive.org to crawl that URL.
cutler
Not sure what you mean by orange.
nickclaw
Sorry I could have been clearer. The archive.org page that shows all scans[1] will mark dates as orange (4xx), green (3xx), or blue (presumably 2xx). The reason I don't think that the link you posted is indicative of something is that all the scans of that url resulted in 4xx's. As opposed to scans of index.php[2] which primarly show 2xx responses. Any framework, Coldfusion or not, will generally throw a 404 when you hit paths that don't exist.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120801000000*/http://www.faceb... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120801000000*/http://www.faceb...

cutler
But wouldn't an index.cfm have existed at some point for the archive to flag specific years with an entry? It's the archive doing the scanning, not me.
wilsocr88
I love the phrasing of the headline. At first it sounds almost accusatory. Caught red handed! :)

MySpace was in Coldfusion, I'm pretty sure, so maybe they were playing with that at some point.