I'm confused. What is an ASP and PHP?

Question

I'm having a website build for me and the designer has asked whether I can get the company who are hosting the site to activate the PHP and ASP. He tried to explain what it was but found it difficult to articulate. Can anyone shed any light on this in an easy to understand (not toooo techy) way?

Answer 1

Don't think anyone has really answered the question. Here's my go.

PHP and ASP are two different technologies that allow you to have a "dynamic" website. A static website is easy to create in the first place - you just have lots of pages written in HTML, which is the code that web browsers read to display the pages. However, this is very difficult to update as you would need to create a new HTML page every time you updated your website.

So a dynamic system stores the content for your website in a database, where it's easy to update. PHP and ASP are two alternative ways of writing scripts that read the content in the database and display it as an HTML page that the browser understand. They'll also allow there to be a nice interface to allow you to log in and edit the content.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

ASP - Active Server Pages
PHP - PHP is a Hypertext Processor

Both of these are modules where the server will execute code on a page before returning it. Their really isn't a non-techy way to describe this because it can be quite complicated. Basically, anytime you're on the net and you see web pages that end in .php or .asp, they are using those technologies. What it does is, instead of serving the plain html page it can execute code that can generate the page. For example, on a message board the page reflects the boards contents. It pulls the posts from a database and generates the table structure before returning the page. This way, you always see the latest information when you fetch a page.

Answer 3

Hello,

(ANS) ASP stands for "active server page" & is a type of language used to create more dymanic (interactive type) web pages. PHP is yet another scripting or programming language used to create dyamic website pages.

But the most important point here is that who ever is going to be hosting your new website, the hosting company has to enable or provide support for both .ASP & .PHP files (the server on which your site is to live must be able to run (use) these languages.

Otherwise your website wont be able to run the features & functions your site designer would like to give you. You might not get the bells & whistles you want inorder to make the site more attractive or easier to use,etc.

IR

Answer 4

Ok...PHP and ASP do basically the same thing. The difference between the two is the web server they work with. PHP works with Apache web server and ASP works with M$ II$ web server.
As to what they do, I will specifically explain what PHP does since I am more familiar with it. PHP is a scripting language (scripting is a form of programming) that communicates with databases such as Oracle and MySQL. It then takes the results of the database queries and formats it in HTML format that the web server can then send to a web browser. Both scripting languages can do other things but are best known for communicating with databases to build dynamic web sites.
Hope this helps.
John

Answer 5

They are basically scripting languages that websites are programmed in. HTML is a simple file that is processed by your web browser when you access it. PHP is run by the webserver that hosts the site and the results of this are sent to the user as a web page. I think ASP is similar to PHP but haven't used it myself.

If someone designing your site wants it just contact your web host and ask them to give you the service, you may need to pay more.

Answer 6

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. It is marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS).

Programming ASP websites is made easier by various built-in objects. Each object corresponds to a group of frequently-used functionality useful for creating dynamic web pages.

PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic Web pages. PHP is used mainly in server-side application software, but can be used from a command line interface or in standalone graphical applications.

Answer 7

ASP is from Microsoft and it works fine in windows server with iis
PHP is a scripting language and works in all servers and engines.
If you want a money related hint ASP programmers are cheaper than PHP programers

Answer 8

PHP and ASP are computing languages used to do complex things such as sending forms etc. on the internet. Both languages have positives and negatives

For more Info:
ASP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Server_Pages

PHP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP