PHP 5.0 Goes For Microsoft's ASP-dot-Net

Dozix007 writes "Uberhacker.Com reports : Zend Technologies quietly announced last week the final release of the open source PHP version 5. An interesting article reports the different strengths and weaknesses of ASP vs. PHP, and it becomes quite clear that with the release of PHP5, Zend has taken a shot at ASP's heart. The differences from PHP4 to 5 has created a clear advantage for the new preprocessor over Microsoft's proprietery ASP."

Comments

Another article

[jacoplane]

There was an article detailing the zend release on kuro5hin a few days ago. Quite a good read...

Re:It's Visual Studio, not the languages!

[angst7]

I've been using Zend Studio for about a year and a half now, and it's a great IDE for doing PHP stuff. It has code completetion, a nice debugger, good integrated documentation, and a host of other nice features. I run it on both my Windows and Linux boxen, and I absolutely love it.

ASP.NET inaccuracies

[Burb]

A few comments from an ASP.NET user:

The article implies that CLR code is interpreted. All .NET runs compiled code, either JIT or AOT compiled. And there's an unsubstantiated remark about efficiency and "Long code paths". That looks like FUD to me, and without something substantial it seems suspicious.

Re:Ok, here is where I object:

[robertjw]

So...I have to pay for features that I can get from the competitor for free, I have to pay (my employees) to insure that I am paying what I need to (for a product wich offers comparable services as the competitor) and I get to continually be pressed to upgrade and give them more money in licensing fees.

Exactly. This is my biggest complaint against proprietary/commercial software, and the largest benefit of Open Source. As a sys admin I spend more time trying to figure out how many licenses we have, what is a legal use of a license, when we should upgrade, why we should upgrade, etc... Maintenance of the licenses cost us more than the license purchase itself.

On top of that, old versions are usually unavailable for purchase after the new version is released, so we can't just purchase one license of a perfectly useful product for a new employee, we have to upgrade 30 people.

For me, PHP vs ASP would be an obvious decision just because of the licensing. With PHP don't have to maintain the licenses. When I need to add a new server I wouldn't have to pay for an upgrade on the 10 existing servers.

Re:It's Visual Studio .. PHP Editor Galores!

[Phiu-x]

Need to find a good PHP Editor ?


All of them (commercial,free,OSS) reviewed and classified: http://www.php-editors.com/

My personnal (and free) favorite : PHP EDIT: http://www.waterproof.fr/

Need a PHP Debugger? DBG can do remote debugging and it can be integrated with the PHP Edit IDE, which is very nice : http://dd.cron.ru/dbg/

Now, who need Visual Studio? Almost every (php) editors now has code insight, integrated help, code completion, skins and whatnot. Hell, I sometimes go back to Notepad for quick fixes because its faster to fire up. But if you said PHP need an IDE, I think that you have not looked around very much.

Now people start your eng-uh editors and go code some PHP!

Re:Ok, here is where I object:

[Bedouin X]

I understand licensing issues but they just aren't as big a deal in ASP.NET as these posts (and the article) are making it out. To use ASP.NET you need a license for the server and that's it. Most add-on components are the same. There is also so much ASP.NET sample code out there that there isn't a lot that you can't figure out for free using the same methods that you would use for PHP code.

Licensing issues get a little more complex when dealing with database servers and the like, but using Oracle isn't going to change that and it's not like you can't use MySQL with ASP.NET.

I'm all for the advantages of OSS and PHP does have advantages, but let's not cloud the issue unnecessarily.

Re:Ok, here is where I object:

[mingot]

That's all a matter of perspective I suppose. So I only need one license per server for ASP.NET and one license per server for any add-on components I want to use.

No. You only need a license for the server itself. If you have a licensed installation of whatever running you can install ASP.NET. No need to purchase a license. Your developers can all install ASP.NET on their personal machines. No need to have anything but an OS to install it on.

Way too much FUD

[spideyct]

Inaccuracies:

• ASP.NET does all DB interaction through ODBC (it can, but it also has native drivers)
• ASP.NET is slower/less efficient (pointless statement without evidence)
• ASP.NET is more expensive than PHP (they are both freely downloads)
• ASP.NET platform is more expensive (kinda. both work on Windows - PHP also works on more expensive Unices (so can we say PHP's platform is more expensive?) - PHP works on Linux, ASP.NET can kinda work on Linux if you count Mono)
• ASP.NET is less secure because it requires IIS. Absolutely false! ASP.NET has no dependence on IIS. It just happens to be the default web server on Windows. You are free to write your own web server to host ASP.NET. An example to get you started.
• VB.NET is the "default" .NET language? That statement doesn't make any sense.

The author completely ignored one of ASP.NET's greatest advantages - it is an abstraction from writing HTML (which I guess they think makes it inefficient, just like C is less efficient than machine language). When I write:
TextBox t = new TextBox();
t.Text = "Hello World";
I do not know, nor care, what actual markup will be returned to the client. Before you start worrying that you need absolute control - consider the problem of delivering to multiple browsers/devices. ASP.NET will render different markup, depending on the browsers capabilities. When browsing from a PDA or phone, it will render appropriate markup. Does PHP do that?