PHP was easily one of the first to get some mainstream traction.  I was using it in February &#x27;96, perhaps earlier.  Classic ASP from MS was released in Dec 96, and didn&#x27;t start making inroads (from my vantage point) until mid &#x27;97.  I was stuck in &#x27;97 doing some odd front page weirdness (htc files?  can&#x27;t recall now) which were extremely limiting.  At night, I&#x27;d go home and do PHP, and had an ecommerce system (horrible as it was) running on PHP&#x2F;FI (php v2, essentially) in 1998.<p>By &#x27;97&#x2F;&#x27;98 there were multiple vendors vying in this space - htmlos and ihtml are two names that stick with me, but there are some others I remember but can&#x27;t recall names.  And ColdFusion and whatnot, but... Perl and PHP were the big freebies, even by &#x27;97.  ASP had speed on its side, but PHP already had convenience and price by &#x27;97, and it&#x27;s gained ever since then.  re: Java as server-side web platform - was outside my radar much, but the majority of people I worked with, even Java enthusiasts, didn&#x27;t give it much credence before &#x27;99 - I don&#x27;t think the infrastructure support was quite settled, and it was too &#x27;wild west&#x27; for my colleagues (bunch of other reasons too).  (IIRC, CF didn&#x27;t support user-defined functions for several years, leading to much more difficult to maintain code than it should have been, but... memory gets hazy after 18 years).<p>But... PHP and Perl were free and largely &quot;good enough&quot; for enough of the problems most people were facing which is why they gained as much foothold as they did.  ASP and CF both required a fairly hefty outlay and setup that you generally wouldn&#x27;t be able to pay for without working in a corporate gig.