I remember developing web sites using Livewire and Netscape Enterprise Server, back in 1997 or so. It was neat, but terribly unstable (at least under Windows NT with SQL Server.) "Restarting" the application to see your updates was incredibly annoying. This also had a roughly 20% chance of crashing the web server due to the instability.

1998? woah. We had already invented JSPs by then, hosted in our own HTTP server in written in java...

Yeah, I was thinking how weird this was as we was doing JSPs in high volume for different parts of the Dutch gov. Not only did it exist, it was already popular enough to have popped up in ultra slow Dutch gov institutions.

Perfect example of a over-engineered and unusable product.

I worked in a bank which used the later Netscape server.

There was a project that consumed 10+ person-years of effort (easy) and produced nothing.