Is PHP typically used with ASP.NET?

[preWarp]

In a stack consisting of Microsoft products e.g. IIS, SQL exchange server, asp.net, and visual studio; How is PHP used with ASP.NET? Does ASP.NET have a PHP compiler? Is ASP.NET a way to securely execute PHP in some isolated way? My dream system is an ERP based on PHP. How would the ERP in PHP depend on the ASP.NET framework?

[Barand]

25 minutes ago, preWarp said:

How is PHP used with ASP.NET?

In much the same way as Superman uses kryptonite.

[preWarp]

Is there a PHP framework for a Microsoft stack? What is it called?

[maxxd]

You can run PHP on IIS, sure. For the most part, PHP frameworks don't really care what server software it's running on as long as the correct version of PHP is supported and it has the necessary extensions installed. Now, to be honest, I personally wouldn't recommend running PHP on IIS but that's up to you.

And no, PHP and ASP.NET are not interchangeable and they probably won't coexist peacefully on the same machine but I haven't tried so ... .

[preWarp]

Thank you. The answers are very important to me. I was wondering what would a better language be for an Enterprise Resource Planning system and also a good Microsoft stack?

[maxxd]

I'm biased toward php, but in my (admittedly long ago) experience with .net, php is just a better experience for internet app and site development. As I remember it, php was easier to read and reason about, the conditional structures were easier to follow, etc. I vaguely remember having to jump through several hoops in .net to complete what was a fairly simple loop structure in php - though again, this may be tinted by my preference for php in general so ymmv.

[Barand]

I started my web programming using ASP but after a while decided to give PHP a go. A couple of examples spring to mind.

1. A simple page which allowed users in one of our departments to view daily comments from a log. One day I had a complaint that the page took 15 seconds to load in the browser. Repeated tests on that day's data gave the same result. The comments on this day were particularly verbose. I wrote a PHP version which, when tested on that same day's data, repeatedly  produced the results in just over 0.2 seconds (70x faster). This was an exception but, normally, PHP was better that 3x faster.
2. A page which allowed the public to enter their location and a search radius and it would find the time of all bus services, in the next hour, which departed from stops in the search radius. There was, however, a problem in the city centre with a high stop density. A radius of 200m would cause the whole thing to timeout after 30 seconds. Again a PHP rewrite was tried. Even at a radius of 2000m it displayed all the stops and times within a few seconds - no timing out.

Score 2 for PHP. After those my boss stopped objecting to my using PHP. (His objection had been on the grounds that it wasn't a MS product!)

[maxxd]

Yeah, I remember being kinda shocked at how slow .net was compared to php. I don't know if it's server load overhead or what, but php always seemed much snappier.

[Barand]

From my first experience above, I came to the conclusion that asp was particularly slow whenever string concatenation was involved.

[preWarp]

Barand, Maxxd; Thank you for your replies. I now understand that popularity of PHP is likly why OpenERP, ERPNext, and serveral other related software for inventory management or CRM are written in PHP. Glassfish and Tomcat come to mind when I consider that java is  also a popular language where you find an ERP eg. OpenBoxes or Odoo. 

 

Thanks to your answers I could see that like any language or even framework you have these projects, jumping off points, and recipe/cookbook/manuals. It turns out that the language of ASP.NET is C# and .Net. I found an ERP that is current and popular. From the website:

Quote

VIENNA Advantage uses Microsoft .Net MVC as its programming platform with PostgreSQL and Oracle as database choices. Currently VIENNA Advantage is working on a transition to .Net Core.

 

This ERP when downloaded has an archive with the web hosting pages and a oracle dump file. 

My "stack" then will consist of IIS server, ASP.NET, and Visual Studio. I have used visual studio for C++ programming but never a book with a focus on hosting a .NET application as webpage. Maybe this is covered in books about ASP.NET.

Just for reference I want to link to a linked in article that shows popularity of VIENNA Advantage here:

ERP Report SAP vs NetSuite vs VIENNA Advantage

  

[gizmola]

In general, people with a substantial investment in microsoft server infrastructure will use a product built to run on the microsoft stack you mentioned. 

The only oddity in the ERP you found is that it was built for Oracle.  I know I'm glossing over Postgresql, but in general, when you see this as an alternative, it's because Postgressql has a high degree of architectural and syntactic similarity to Oracle, so that it is often used as a substitute, to save on licensing costs.

Here are the stack combinations I see most frequently:

Java/Tomcat/Glassfish/etc/Oracle(Postgresql)

Nodejs/MySQL/Postgresql/Document DB's

Apache/Nginx/php-fpm/MySQL/Postgresql

IIS/.NET/Sql Server

You began this thread with the claim you wanted to find a PHP based solution.  PHP has no relationship to .NET/ASP etc. and vice-versa.   

ASP is microsoft's framework for building web applications.  PHP is not related or an option.

With that said, in general ERP's are closed systems, that will provide configuration options, and some sort of api for integrating with other systems.  Sometimes integration options are driven by the underlying platform, but usually people are more interested in the features of the ERP and how it will meet the needs of their existing business. 

[preWarp]

Thanks for this insight into stacks. I plan to use awareness of the Microsoft stack to better see what to study in order to develop some experience. I did mention PHP. I will use Apache if I ever use PHP. My focus will be about administration rather than development. I wanted self hosting experience. There was a PHP based ERP called openERP and it runs on IIS. Albeit, IIS 5.0 and Windows NT. I didn't know of any contemporary ERP that was a fit for Microsoft products. Thanks for pointing out that Vieena Advantage is actually a hybrid and not purely Microsoft.