Personal Bytes

Today I found a review comparing PHP and ASP. It is dated from yesterday (22-12-2005) but it looks kind of old since it is too brief and does not get into the rabbit’s whole if you know what I mean. It covers important matters like speed, interoperability and cost. Three sectors where PHP is far ahead from ASP.

PHP has changed and so has ASP. I remember that the first web programming language that I learned was precisely ASP along with a pretty basic Access database (you gotta start from somewhere, right? ;-). I made a few websites with it so I gained some experience. But you’re only able to compare when you try other things. By that time, PHP was raising its hype status (kind of what’s Ruby today) and version 2.x was released. I took a grip on it and, oh dear, what a difference.

First of all, Apache (even on Windows, my main platform by that time *grasp*) was cazillions faster than IIS. IIS took ages to do a simple page refresh and plus, it had to be restarted from times to times without no apparent reason. Secondly, PHP’s documentation and development support was far better. Checking out PHP.net solved the majority of my problems. The queer ones were solved by checking users’ comments or asking in irc (freenode.org #php).

Nowadays, PHP has matured a lot and ASP gained a framework, .NET, that allows one to use whatever language he likes. Besides, it inherited a big OO API (like Java) with better documented support and enterprise features. And PHP has evolved, managing to keep its simplicity.

And it’s on simplicity that ASP.NET lacks. Microsoft’s idea of building a event-oriented web programming language missed the target. Mapping widgets as web forms was a good concept but on practice, that isn’t what’s intended. On the other hand, PHP lacks a decent framework. Well, not any more. But it’s still under development.

To sum up and from the experience I gained by programming in both worlds (PHP, ASP and ASP.NET) I may say that they focus different targets. PHP is targeted for small and medium websites where Rapid Appliaction Development is required. Small deadlines. ASP is not feasible when you have things like PHP. And ASP.NET is useful when you need to use .NET framework or enterprise services. But then again, I would definitely use JSP/Servlets instead of ASP.NET. But that’s my stake.

P.S. - I would like to put Ruby [on Rails] on the middle of these two. I find that it covers pretty well the usual tasks, it provides a true MVC model to work with and it allows hyper extreme RAD. But I don’t know about it’s enterprise features. I’ll digg on it.