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.