Question for MJ and Other Programmers

[LamboMP]

For server side coding, what is better in your professional opinion?

PHP?
or
ASP.NET?

Why?

What are the main differences between the two (other than the fact that ASP is microsoft and PHP is open source)?

Is one more reliable than the other? Need your opinions!

Hopefully this question helps other programmers as well!!

 

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[LamboMP]

Thanks JScott.. looking forward to hearing your input on this

You always have interesting view points on things, and the information you provide is very insightful.

 

[aptohosting]

We have been at this for few years and we have done a lot of both. I would stick with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MYSQL, PHP) all day long. It can be argued both ways but I feel that it is a much more stable platform and there is a lot more support for it.

Tom
www.aptohosting.com

 

[dhuang]

Wow. Great post - I was always biased toward PHP, but I didn't know the tidbits of ASP.NET. Thanks JScott! Repped++!

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

I've always worked in Windows environments; I've used ASP (VBScript) in the late 90's and then later moved to ASP.net. However, recently I started to dabble with PHP.

From a cost standpoint, PHP has an advantage because you can get into a LAMP (Linux,Apache,MySql,PHP) environment for very little dollars. An MS environment always costs more because of licenses; I remember my SQL Server licenses costing a fortune. Everything Microsoft does usually costs money, including 3rd party software.

Also, the most robust Content Mgmt Systems/Blog systems employ PHP (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, phpNuke). Again, these systems are open source and FREE. Aside from DotNetNuke (DNN) which utilizes .net, the pickings for CMS systems in a ASP.net environment aren't very extensive. If you plan on using an OpenSource CMS system and then modifying the crap out of, knowing PHP REALLY, REALLY comes in handy.

As for capabilities, I'm not familiar enough with PHP to tell you which. I can say that early on in my learnings, I like ASP.NET a whole lot better ... but again, that is because I am still more familiar with it.

Moving forward, I am using PHP now because I am working with a CMS system that uses it ... also, I didn't particularly like DNN.

 

[LamboMP]

Excellent thank you guys for your insight.

One additional question, what is the difference between ASP.NET 3.5 VB and ASP.NET 3.5 in C#? Should you choose one over the other?

 

[NoMoneyDown]

Jscott and others had some very good responses. I'll add that Zend is a company founded by the original PHP developers and has a lot of good (and FREE) PHP applications, frameworks, etc., that you can use to support it. I've dabbled with ZendCore and ZendFramework and am impressed. (BTW, they make their revenue from selling services/support.) I've also used ZendGuard which is a PHP code obfuscator/encoder to protect your IP (if you plan on licensing it). I have never used ASP.Net so I cannot comment on it WRT to PHP. Also as aptohosting mentioned, I would go with the XAMPP (on Windows) or LAMPP (on Linux) stack as it makes life so much easier (if you're hosting company allows it).

 

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[Jonleehacker]

My 2 cents to continue this discussion:

Microsoft now makes very useful versions of their .Net development tools available for free, so the licensing issues that used to hinder developers are largely gone.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

They are actually surprisingly progressive with tools like the Facebook developer kit, etc.

When I got my latest laptop, I didn't even bother installing the enterprise versions of Visual Studio in favor of the free versions, just to keep my system more light weight. A couple of the hardcore features are missing, but nothing very substantial.

Even the SQL Server Express (free version) is very robust.

It is actually ironic now that Microsoft is giving away Visual Studio, as a while ago I was searching for a decent PHP IDE and anything I could find that was on par with Visual Studio had a $500+ price tag...who woulda thunk it?

In an enterprise environment ASP.NET will have some serious advantages over PHP, since it is built out from the .NET tools. Therefore if you want to build a proper n-tier application that offers and consumes shared services .NET allows you to do a lot of things that PHP never could (you would have to move into C++ or Java).

In my opinion though the biggest drawback with ASP.Net is that it needs to run on a Windows server From my experience Windows 2003 Server just is just downright brittle and less stable than a Linux machine, so even though ASP.net is wonderful, as soon as you start getting into mission critical or high security apps, you will need a very high IT maintenance budget.

If you do decide to go with the ASP.NET / SQL Server Express setup, make sure you hosting company supports SQL Server Express. They are different than MSSQL Server full version (install locally) and not all the hosting companies are up to speed yet (and even worse, some think they are and they aren't).

 

[dhuang]

I'll add that Zend is a company founded by the original PHP developers and has a lot of good (and FREE) PHP applications, frameworks, etc...

I use ZendStudio for Eclipse as my IDE and the Zend Framework - Framework is a great package, and has tons of functionality out of the box. I'm using the Zend Framework to power a niche site that I'm building. Wasn't hard to setup, but mastering it is a different animal.

ZendStudio is a great IDE, but I haven't really scratched and sniffed all the features just yet, but it catches my errors and helps me debug!

 

[Jonleehacker]

Maybe the question should have been:

ASP.NET vs PHP vs. Google?

Google on Tuesday announced its new Google App Engine, and opened a preview version to the first 10,000 users to sign up. The service essentially does for Web apps what Google Blogger does for bloggers: provides a hosting solution for Web developers to build their apps on top of, integrating with other Google services and sparing developers the trouble of server maintenance and scalability. Basically, Google wants to be your (free) sysadmin.

As Google says in Tuesday's press release, "The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance." This looks to be a good way to counteract the "TechCrunch Effect"—server slowdown in the early days due to the traffic crush from early adopters. Google App Engine gives users enough CPU power and bandwidth to handle around 5 million page views per month.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2282273,00.asp

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfgO-LXGpTM[/ame]

Pretty wild. http://code.google.com/appengine/

 

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