What's Better: ASP or PHP?

[HyperGeek]

I know VBScript and like it but there seems to be a great amount of really affordable hosts that don't support ASP...so that's the question: How do ASP and PHP compare?

Are they both just as functional as the other? How much different is it to transact with a database in PHP?

BTW: Please, no MS bashing. I don't care about someone's personal politics when it comes to Windows or Microsoft. I really just want to know whether or not PHP is going to be as easy to get into as ASP.

Opinions...?

[mat_bastian]

This might have a slight ASP slant since it is an ms page, but over all I, not knowing ASP and learning PHP, found the assessment of PHP to be Fair and didn't feel like they were trumpeting the virtues of ASP.

[msdn.microsoft.com...]

I think if you want to get a job, you might have better luck going the ,net path, if you freelance, I don't think you can beat PHP for versatility.

[claus]

I do believe asp has some scalability issues when used on high-trafficked sites with a lot of database calls. It slows down, and very much so.

People who like asp a lot will tend to say that "this is just because of bad coding." I'm not convinced, as this would imply that most of the large asp-driven solutions i see are build by bad programmers.

If you're not planning a lot of interdependencies and/or a lot of traffic, imho, they can do the same so choose the flavour you like the most.

/claus

[legster]

I work for a large web company. We have ASP, PHP, and Cold Fusion sites. PHP is new to us but we seem to be leaning toward doing more sites with PHP, and trying to get rid of our ASP sites.

[Gibble]

I've coded fairly complex web apps in both and I much prefer PHP for it's flexibility and I never seem to be caught on wierd nuances with it like I do ASP.

[TheWebographer]

I have used both ASP and PHP, and prefer PHP. I like the community and PHP/MySQL on Apache servers can certainly do anything 99% of us would ever need.

[cyril kearney]

I have used ASP. PHP and Coldfusion. I prefer ASP. I think all 3 are reliable and all seem to take about the same to code and debug. I've moved on to ASP.NET for most large-scale newer work. It has a steeper learning curve but seems to me the wave of the future.

[jatar_k]

I have done some work in ASP and really felt it was a pain and not very straight forward.

I, obviously, prefer php. ;)

I figure that if you run 2 coders of equivalent skill against each other on equivalent servers it would be hard to find any huge difference.

Though would we ever have to strip the nix box to get it to run like IIS.

[dvduval]

I have found Cold Fusion to be the easiest to learn. Once I learned Cold Fusion, I found it was easy to do the same thing in PHP. I've also been able to port things over to ASP but there always seems to be more quirky things about ASP.

I've also found the PHP community to be superior to ASP and Cold Fusion. It's not hard to get the answer to a PHP problem. If you look hard you can get the answer to ASP problems, but I feel there are more places to go for help with PHP.

Also, when it comes to PHP there are more pre-written scripts readily available. If you want to do something in PHP, chances are there is a free script that already does it. It may not be exactly what you need, but you can customize it to your specifications. Yes, there are scripts available for ASP and Cold Fusion, but not nearly the volume of PHP.

[mattur]

With CGI, you were right in the http stream returning headers. The server-side scripting languages (PHP, ASP, etc) moved to the next abstraction layer, where the code moved into the pages. So .NET and J2EE (and obviously this ignores loads of other technologies:)) are the next abstraction level up where you write at the application level.

I layout an information architecture and use it to structure the URLs of the whole site: I want the urls to be usable keywords.

eg:
/widgets/

rather than:
bbbrrrrr.x?Beeep!&wave=adeadCh1cken&sess=;usr=aaarrghh
or something ;)

So I tend to do semi-static sites where a database-backed system maintains a set of directories & files (which can be html or php, asp etc). Do .NET and J2EE make it easier to do this?

[gangstah]

I've been using ASP for years and am pretty much a novice at PHP. Lately I've been converting some PHP to ASP and have noticed that PHP is a little more "elegant" in it's code. I especially like the way you can work with strings. Another good thing about PHP is you can use it in multiple environments whereas ASP is pretty much stuck in Windows (I hate chiliSoft).

All that being said...I'm sure I'll stick with ASP...it's my security blanket ;)