Yesterday, Macromedia announced that it was merging with Allaire Corporation. Given the troubles Allaire has been having in the past year, I'm not too surprised. Allaire is the creator of Cold Fusion, a rapid application development language that has been around for a few years now. It's easy to build things in CF, and that was the whole point for those of us who in 1997 were sick of hacking Perl code from Matt's Script Archive.

But Cold Fusion was also Allaire's only big product. Allaire released Spectra, a Web content management system (CMS) that ran under Cold Fusion, in late-1999. Allaire has eschewed the usual CMS business model by selling Spectra relatively cheaply (around USD $15,000) and leaving development contracts to partners. It was a risk, and it didn't work. Many of the same one- and two-person development teams that had used Cold Fusion to build discussion forums and address books found Spectra complex and buggy. And while Spectra was falling flat, open source was doing an end run with PHP and JSP (very CF-like templating languages) and Zope (a simple but expandable CMS).

Macromedia has had its own challenges. For a few years now the company has been attempting to leverage their Web development tools to access the Web application development market, first with Drumbeat, than with UltraDev. But the leverage didn't work, I expect because Web design has become specialized to the point that designers who use Dreamweaver don't have that much influence on the development side.

One of the healthiest things for John Q. Webmaker has been the competition among Macromedia, Adobe, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft around bottom-up Web development tools. The Allaire purchase ups the ante a bit, which I think is good for everyone.