PHP

PHP is mainly used in alongside its trusty  HTML to display dynamic content on the site. Think of it has a cradle holding a baby, but of course PHP isn’t young to any of us, being around since 1995. The HTML of course only processes the actual PHP code within its boundaries, everything else is sent to thw output.

PHP’s main advantages  lies within its architecture in PHP LAMP. The LAMP architecture has become very widespread within the Internet world as a way to provide less expensive, reliable, scalable and robust Internet programs and applications. PHP is widely utilized as in this package with Linux, Apache and MySQL. PHP can be used with a vast number of relational database management systems, works exceptionally well on most if not all web servers and is available for literally every operating system out there, i mean who wouldn’t want to support PHP?! This popularity and compatibility means that PHP itself has a vast base installed over the Internet, more than 20 million Internet domains are currently residing on servers with PHP installed.

When PHP 5 was released, more improvements came in the way of exception handling and true OOP, but still no namespace to avoid name collisions of class. Also many argue that type checking is quite loose, that might potentially cause some problems. Another disadvantage regarding PHP is that variables are not really considered as a type (more about this later). Lastly, for some reason large firms lean towards commercial products with the blue collar backing, if it doesn’t come in a suit and has a price label its not worth looking at?! If they are not going to pay for it, then it isn’t worth purchasing, a statement that falls short considering now there is a vast amount of outstanding free open source software and applications out there that not only does the job but beats commercial software hands down, but of course that’s another argument altogether!

ASP.NET

If you program in ASP.NET, you may fall into two categories, you work for a wealthy firm or your a huge fan of Microsoft . The name itself originates from the old technology, Microsoft ASP, a major transformation with the NET Framework; CLR will enable you to use common languages for the processing back-end such as; Visual Basic.NET, C ++ etc.

The  advantages of ASP.NET are  it’s  object-oriented features, and due to the features of CLR you can have C # and VB.NET developers working on simultaneously on the exact same project, or in most cases switch languages in between and not rewrite all the previous classes. . NET class library is sperated into classes according to their hereditary around specific tasks, such as working with XML or image manipulation, so many more common tasks are already handled for you.

Visual Studio. NET is a huge development IDE that (if your computer is fast enough) will decrease much coding time. It also has built-in debugging and IntelliSense, which allows for automatic completion of methods and variables, so it saves you having to remember everything.

ASP.NET is expensive and that’s probably its biggest obstacle. It uses quite a considerable amount of resources on the server, anything low spec machine wont cut it iam afraid. Windows 2003 and Visual Studio. NET are quite expesnive. It’s very rare ASP.NET applications not running on IIS. And if you pay attention to one of the bug reports, you’ll notice that Windows and IIS had some history of weakness to use.

So which is better?

As much as i like making dcisions, its always nice to hear from the community. But in reality PHP is less expensive, robust, fast and widely supported. ASP.NET has much faster development turn around and is much easier because of the class library system that can obviously be maintained more easily. These languages are both nice, just like a Porsche or Lamborghini, since most things come down to price, i think that might be the determining factor between these two languages What do you think?