PHP and ColdFusion Release Timeline
I was reading the articles mentioned in this Ben Forta blog entry and decided to make a timeline of PHP and ColdFusion releases. The reason I was thinking of this was because one of the articles said that one of ColdFusion's selling points is frequent releases. This made me curious how often CF has been updated when compared to PHP. So I created this time line.
Some things to note about this timeline:
- I only included x.x releases (no x.xx)
- The timeline is not accurate down to month and day...while those dates are available in many cases, I was only interested to know what year each version was released.
- The data came from Wikipedia and PHP's official website.
So looking at the time line, some interesting things to consider.
- ColdFusion has had more major releases than PHP. That said, we all know that version numbers are not officially measured by anybody (the product developers can arbitrarily decide what to call each version), so looking at version numbers does not necessarily mean that ColdFusion is more mature than PHP.
- PHP has had more minor releases than ColdFusion. There are always ColdFusion "hotfixes" that are often numbered as x.xx, but we CF developers generally have to wait for the next major release before we'll see new features.
- PHP seems to have somewhat larger gaps between releases.
- Both ColdFusion and PHP seemed to have had fewer releases in the last few years when compared to their early years.
Jake Munson
36 Yrs old
Some of the .01 releases have been quite significant. CF 7.0.1 for instance brought a lot of Flex integration.
And of course you need to add CF9 which is going to be released on HAHA.
P.S. I heard a rumor that the original definition of PHP was Pretty Hopeless Predicament.
+1 for David (written in PHP)
+1 for David (written in PHP)
+1 for David (written in PHP)
+1 for David .....
To be fair, I don't think your 2 day experience is a real indication of experience...sure you didn't like it, but I'd want someone to use it for a length of time before declaring it a bad language when compared to others.
I am not a PHP developer, having only dabbled with it off an on over the years. But one thing that PHP does have going for it is popularity. Because it's so popular, there are tons of developers writing libraries and software for PHP. I'd wager that you could think of anything to do with a programming language and then look for it in PHP, and someone has done it. The ColdFusion community is getting better at this (lots of libraries and software available), but in my opinion we still don't measure up to PHP in this regard.
The main two appeals of PHP are
1. Its popularity
2. It's free
#1 is a by-product of #2, not derived from any overly-appealing technological capabilities or developmental benefits. That said, probably the primary benefit of PHP compared to ColdFusion is its huge community, and all of the open source code and projects that you can leverage in your development.