PHP or ASP???

Question

What is the exact use of each of this language (or package?)?
Please specify which application is the best preffered under which kind of situation

Answer 1

Actually, there is a huge difference in philosophy.

ASP is Microsoft proprietary. that means you are pretty much locked into what they decide to provide, and you will be BUYING tools and services form them and their partners FOREVER.

PHP however is a free open source programming language. It also runs on windows, but not only that. Most of the internet servers in the world by far do NOT run Windows, they run Linux or another Unix variant.

Open Source means "free as in beer, and free as in speech". There are communities of people on the net, lots of them in the case of PHP who are out there to help you, and at the same time they are fixing bugs in the language and adding new features.

Some of them are paid, for their effort, some are not. for instance, I recently spoke to a colleague who was hired by another colleague who is a manager at Yahoo. since yahoo itself uses PHP for most of its work, they hired the 1st colleague to add certain features to PHP that they would like to have in the future.

Do you think Yahoo would be able to do that at Microsoft? I don't, certainly not for the price of a handful of programmers.

Once the features are done, Yahoo will make them available to everyone version of PHP, FOR FREE, because that is the way Open Source software works.

Here is a good link to start learning about Open source software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

I promise you there is at least as much out ther for you for free in Open source software as there is in Microsoft-land, and especially when it comes to server-side development, anything Microsoft is *not* the way to go.

As for ChillisoftASP, yeah, that is one approach to use ASP if you must on Unix. I don't know if it is still kept up to date, but I used to be a manager at the company that bought ChiliSoft (the company, not the software). that would be better chosen as an approach to migrate AWAY from Microsoft and towards Unix. If you have never gotten trapped by Microsoft in the first place, then stick with PHP.

If you want a taste of what free, open source software can do for you, try out knoppix.org. Download and burn the latest cd or dvd, and boot from that...just a taste, but you will be amazed.

Answer 2

They are both used in web design and development.

PHP started as a preprocessor and developed into a full middleware language. It started on *nix.

ASP, right now as ASP.NET (and before that, plain ASP and ASPx) is more of a platform of technology, as the language used is actually (and mostly) VBScript, though you *could* use JScript, PerlScript, or some OTHER languages that MS have used. It only runs on Microsoft stuff (except ChiliASP! which is an ASP middleware for Netscape servers).

There's really no... preference. It's mostly up to the programmer. They both will do almost anything asked of them, albeit with somewhat different syntax.

Answer 3

Well, it depends on what the developer prefers. Personally, I use PHP (.php) for Forum/Message boards, and ASP (.aspx) for forms such as news letter sign-up forms.