limey

I am a novice programmer and I have recently been using mostly ASP. Whilst looking around the Internet for help and suggestions I have found that PHP seems to be far more common and popular. As I am relatively new to this subject I am wondering what are the fundamental differences between ASP and PHP and do they use the same methods and objects. Is PHP hard to learn for someone who is used to ASP and why would they prefer to use it.

eanda9001

PHP is very easy to learn. It has more of a C syntax. There IMC and other venues provide excellent support. I like PHP because of native Linux support. I think you can run ASP on Linux but those are solutions that are not from Microsoft.

Having done a very complex PHP project I will say that if you are doing something very complex 10,000+ lines of code you should consider java, C#, or ASP.NET but only if you are like OO. PHP skills are cheap to acquire as most college and HS kids know it.

SinisterMotives

The best way to learn PHP is to read the online manual, or better yet, download the Windows CHM (HTML Help) version of the manual and keep it open while you're coding. It's not a strongly typed language (although it offers strong typing as of version 5), so if you're familiar with JavaScript it should be a piece of cake. I've found that I can easily port scripts from ASP to PHP despite knowing very little about the ASP object model (although I am admittedly familiar with OOP in JavaScript in general).

In addition to the core language functions, PHP is organized around extensions that provide scripting interfaces for common open source C/C++ libraries. Some of the most common extensions, such as MySQL, are compiled into PHP by default. You can do object-oriented programming in PHP, but the built-in functions and extension functions are not usually object-oriented (DOMXML being a notable exception). Thus, the names of most functions have the name of the module prefixed: e.g., mysql_query(), array_push(), etc.

Spanxxx

use PHP if you want to work in the *nix world and learn asp/asp.net if you want to work in the M$ world (where the majority of businesses hire) one day. That might sound biased, but I don't mean it as such. It's just pragmatic. As a web developer who depends on these skills for a paycheck, I will learn whichever seems to be most popular and most likely to get me a job. Right now, that is the Asp.Net skill set.

As far as wanting to know which one is "better"...... pshhht. That's like asking "Mac or PC?" , "Coke or Pepsi?". The point is that both get the job done and it often comes down to personal preference. That's what really matters.

The key is that if you want to run a linux server and have a good scripted web site, php is probably your best bet. If you are running IIS then I'd keep at the asp/asp.net products if you can do so.

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theFez

personally i strongly prefer php. but im also a linux geek and a strong perl programmer and prefer the c syntax.

i have not done any asp.net programming yet however. just trying to learn vbscript by fixing an undocumented website.

tropi

I thought ASP just meant Active Server Pages, but you could code in whatever language was available (VB, C#, etc). Am I wrong in that?

Spanxxx is right about the business world, though. Although I was able to change my last company from heading down the MS ASP route into Linux/PHP for their web application. So there's at least one out there.

theFez

kind of. ASP is active server pages but is usually VBscript. ASP.NET is more flexible and done in a .NET language.

oh i wish the site im working on now was C# and ASP.NET instead of ASP and VBscript.

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irseg

I like PHP. I have experience with C/C++ and Perl, so it was extremely easy to learn.

However I recently got a job at a company that's almost entirely Windows-based. I've been rewriting a lot of classic ASP stuff into ASP.NET+C# (while learning all three as I go.. good times!). As far as I'm concerned ASP.NET is a klugdy, slow, unintuitive pain in the ass.

The IT director told me that they go with Windows because it's so much easier to administer. Hah. Sure everything looks cute and simple and easy and intuitive on the surface, but good luck if you want to do anything even remotely custom. Perfect example--I had to set up Linux and Windows boxes to append a copyright footer to all websites on the servers.

With Linux/Apache, it was a matter of installing mod_layout and adding 4 lines to httpd.conf. I had a problem where the uncompressed footer would be applied to compressed PHP sites, but that was remedied with a directive telling it not to append to files with php MIME types.

On Windows/IIS, it looked incredibly easy. An "Enable document footer" checkbox. Chose the footer file, checked the box, everything looked great. Until I found that .asp and other dynamic pages didn't get a footer. Even worse, for whatever strange reason, the footer was being appended to .exe files so people were downloading corrupted programs from us.

OK, next step-- IIS has ISAPI filter capability. I spent about 2 weeks trying to figure it out and make it work consistently thanks in large part to the extremely sparse documentation. Everything looked great-- it appended the footer to files with text/html MIME types. All was well on my test computer (WinXP with IIS 5.1). Threw it on an IIS 5.0 box. Looked great. Reloaded a few times, it started getting slower and slower. Then IIS crashed. Tried again, noticed IIS was consuming 15 more megabytes of memory every time the 200-byte test page was reloaded. Made sure I was properly using the ISAPI memory management functions, everything was good. Eventually said screw that server, I'll see if one running IIS 6 works. Nope, the filter wouldn't even load. Showed it to some other Windows programmers, nobody could figure out WTF was wrong. In fact, code samples from other websites and even MS themselves exhibited the same exact random, IIS-crashing behavior.

Eventually we ended up running everything except .ASP pages thru the ASP.NET preprocessor and setting it up to attach a footer that way, so now everything has all that overhead now.

That's pretty much been my overall experience having adminned the two platforms. I prefer Linux not because I'm some raving anti-big-corporation MS-hating zealot, but because it just friggin' works.

skaven

Here here!

I'm definitely a PHP fan as well. In fact, I switched to PHP after *trying* to implement my former employer's website with ASP, and found that not only was IIS the shittiest web server I'd ever worked with, but ASP/VBScript was a pain to program with. After the site continued to suffer crashes and random MS SQL outages, I threw in the towel and convinced my boss to let me re-implement the whole damn thing from scratch on Linux with PHP/Apache. Best decision I ever made.

Moral: It's never a mistake to know how to program in multiple languages, and PHP is a good one to know. Check out www.w3schools.com for a really good tutorial to get you started.

theFez

I'm with skaven and irseg. I have just started adminning a server 2k3 machine and its my first time dealing with a remote windows machine. all i can say is I WANT SSH!!!

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SinisterMotives

I don't know why anyone would use VBScript instead of JScript with ASP. Not only is JScript based on a standard language (ECMAScript), it requires a lot less keyboarding and is much prettier to look at.

Skaven is right about IIS being a shitty server. PHP will work with IIS, but the PHP developers don't recommend using it as a production server with PHP or any other scripting language because of security issues.

theFez

are you talking about server side or client side? I have never actually even seen client side vbscript, though i know it was originally intended for that purpose.

vbscript is ugly to look at, thats for sure.

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SinisterMotives

You can use client-side VBScript, but I think it only works in IE - so why bother when ECMAScript works in all of them?

nikon23777

PHP is very good, and very easy to learn, there have been a lot of improvements in version 5.0. I highly recommend PHP.