[SOLVED] PHP vs. ASP

[Northern Flame]

hello,

i was just wondering what the main differences between asp and php are.

I was looking through some asp tutorials and it seems like PHP has a lot

more features, and asp seems for complicated. Yet I see many websites

using asp, can anyone let me know what the differences between asp

and PHP are? What can you do in asp that cannot be done in PHP?

[trq]

Are you talking about asp.net or just plain old asp?

 

Plain old asp is a pretty outdated technoligy, asp.net is the new. However, there really isn't anything asp can do that php can't and vice versa.

 

One good thing about php though is the fact thats its open source and cross compatible with many different systems. ie; You can run php on Windows, Linux or Mac as well as many others. I developed in asp (not .net) for a quite a few years before moving to php simply because it does have more features out of the box. Allot of the syuff you would have to write yourself in asp is already provided in php extensions.

[Northern Flame]

oh i didnt know their was an ASP and ASP.NET

but thanks for the reply!

I just started noticing that a lot of websites I came

across were using .aspx files and i wanted to know

what was so good about asp that php didnt have,

but for me i think ill stick to PHP 

[helraizer]

Hehe, necro-posting.

 

Adding to thorpe's point. Since ASP.NET is a Windows language it will only work on a Windows server. Not many webhosts support aspx extensions. Which is a downside for ASP.NET - there are number of features of ASP.NET that are perhaps more powerful than php due to AJAX and the like. 

 

But php is probably the way to go, for most because it is usable on any/most platforms (although there a some functions specific to one platform).

[Crew-Portal]

Ya I would personally stick with PHP because well in my opinion if you want to run a server its best to use a linux, windows are more for entertainment while linux is the best for servers. and since ASP only runs on win systems then your not geting the best server you can.

[dbo]

I wouldn't say that not many hosts support .aspx extensions... it's just that you have to find a Windows host, and typically Windows hosting is more expensive.

 

Anyways, I do quite a bit of development in both languages. It's sorta hard to compare PHP to ASP.NET. PHP is a programming language where as ASP.NET is really a framework. The underlying language is typicall VB or C#. Because it's a framework there is a lot of stuff already baked into it... and when you use ASP.NET you're also pretty much adopting the IDE. Like most Microsoft stuff it's mainly drag and drop and menu driven type of development. It will do a lot for you, but it also comes at a cost. Validation for example... people drag and drop a required field validator on the form and really all it is doing is generating javascript. You need to do extra validation on the server side. Also things like linkbuttons are handled with javascript, so if javascript is disabled the link wont work. I've also found that I have to spend more time tricking some of the default controls to do what I want than I would writing the code myself.

 

In the professional realms ASP.NET is highly regarded because you can quickly develop applications. Developers are basically forced into a somewhat common way of doing things so it's easy to replace developers.

 

Personally, I prefer PHP because, as was mentioned before, you can do everything in PHP that you can do in .NET, but you've got more freedom and options for solutions. Hosting is cheaper, which can often help people who are on a budget. Finally, I just don't like using MS products anymore than I have to but it really comes down to choosing the right tool for the job. Sometimes the answer is PHP sometimes the answer is ASP.NET.

[PC Nerd]

Ive been learning VB.NET (2005/2008 express editions) - so its not specifically using ASP>NET,

 

However comign from a PHP background I much prefer PHP because of its language.  in VB ( and i dont lknow abot C# or C++ etc etc) - the for statements are a lot more constrained ( only havign a <= and  >=), and the loops are all indent based, instead of having  {} to define their limits.

 

Personally i much prefer PHP because its got fantastis MySQL support- whereas VB  is harder to connect to MySQL databases.  This is jsut one thing that PHP can do better.

 

GDLK

[jordanwb]

For about 5 months I used ASP.Net for a Government website. I hated it, it was annoying and it outputted all this annoying garbage and made everypage fail XHTML compliance. PHP is less object oriented (you're not forced to use oop) but it's cleaner and easier to do everything.