Why PHP?

I'm doing some research into why web developers chose to use PHP

[MarkAD]

Hi,

i'm doing some research for a University project into why commercial web developers choose to use PHP over other technologies such as ASP.NET. What are your main motives for employing PHP? Obviously the cost of using PHP is much lower, but do you take into account other factors such as security, interoperability - for e.g. database support, how well PHP works with XML for XSL transformations, debugging - does debugging time influence yout decision? Any feedback on this matter would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark.

[garyr_h]

I chose PHP because it can be used with Liux systems, also the popularity might have had something to do with it. It's much easier finding tutorials on PHP than it is ASP.

[uncle_bob]

I migrated from asp to php because it had more features than asp and was cross platform (same code runs on windows and linux etc).

Since then I've never once considered even looking at asp.net - the thought of getting tied into windows only stuff again gives me the creeps. I know that IIS has improved a lot since I last used it, and I know folks have built impressive stuff with asp.net, but having broken free of microsoft, I have no intention of EVER going back.

[mibrahim]

* Easily integrates with MySQL & PGSQL
* Lots of libraries interfaces ex GD
* Calls the same functions you would use from other linux languages, like getrusage
* Huge Huge .... tons of full open source libraries and software, so I'm not starting from scratch including blogs, XML interfaces and readers for different XML protocols like RSS, RETS (for communicating with real estate databases).
* php.net provides an excellent documentation and includes user comments, the same applies to dev.mysql.com and postgresql.org/docs
* I use an editor called Quanta under linux, which integrates perfect with linux webhosts and can edit directly over the webhost using SSH. Other windows editors use FTP to achieve the same functionality but becomes slower (like HTML tool kit)
* It also has excellent communication with apache libraries and variables plus most hosts allow you to change your local php.ini
* Regular expressions... I don't know how far are those in asp! but at least I can use regex and perl compatible regex (pcre) under php
* The language itself is very versatile

[Habtom]

functions :)

Hab

[hakre]

you want to seriously compare ASP with PHP? you can do in the terms of both languages can create websites and i even worked with both, but the one is fairly developed has great support, is opensource and has a great codebase and the other one is, hmm, something to stuck around with because a customer loves to have asp because it's running on win32 and they think they are able to administrate such a system. so with asp you can make a lot of money and it's great to have ;)