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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."
Interesting how the head-to-head with PHP 5.0 and ASP.NET is hosted on Oracle's site. I guess it's not like Microsoft and Oracle make competing products or anything.
We might as well Get the Facts on Windows and Linux.
Casual Games/Downloads
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.
[sarcasm]Gee whiz, mister; where do I sign up?[/sarcasm]
As a former PHP hacker now forced by the corporate world to program in ASP.NET, the article is forgetting the number one advantage ASP has over PHP. A killer IDE.
I really dislike ASP and Visual Studio, but PHBs tend to like pointly clicky interfaces. It makes them feel like if they have to fire the whole development staff, they can take over coding; after all, it is just a GUI.
Visual Studio is Microsoft's real killer app. That is what Monkey Boy was dancing around screaming developers about. Most developers are mediocre, and if you give them a handholding tool that keeps them from doing anything too stupid (or too great), they will love you for giving them some job security.
Alright PHP guys, can you give us that? Can you save us from having to think for ourselves? I may have filled my last remaining unallocated brain cells reading the man page for gcc.
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
In this article I'll focus on PHP, the technology Oracle has chosen to incorporate into its products, and ASP.NET.
Yup, I expected a completely unbiased article after reading this in the second paragraph..
I am the maverick of Slashdot
I use php all the time, but php is more like the old asp than .Net. .Net is much richer in exeception handing and allows me to use any language I want. Php is great but not a stab at the heart of .Net. They have nothing like VStudio.
everyone wants a piece of Microsoft? Seems like anyone who's somebody wants to grab a piece of Microsoft's monopoly even if it means giving it away to people for free.
Than why do you bring it up?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
From the article:
I've heard this same song from a few developers who work at Oracle shops - and I could not disagree more! Database independence in your code should absolutely be a goal! We can encapsulate our database-specific features into stored procedures or functions without having to pollute our application code with them.
The article states that Visual Basic .NET is Microsoft's default .NET programming language. I've always thought it was C#, because VB.NET lacks some of the features in C#.
I'll stick to my vanilla ASP coffee thanks. It's the old betamax/vhs story. Yes, PHP is better. Yes, it's free and easy to code. But most businesses tend to stick with micro$oft not because they want to, but because .net is designed to work with mssql and ie a lot better. . I want my betamax back... :)
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
Why do people think they can write these sort of articles and make performance claims in them without any sort of supporting evidence? Some quick numbers? A link to a study? Anything?
For me, the choice is clear. You can compare the relatively minor pros and cons of PHP and ASP for days, but really they're both very similarly capable and you'd do about as well with one as with the other. The big difference I see is that PHP is cross platform and ASP is not. To me, that makes PHP the "winner", hands down. It makes it so that you can change platforms with your application later on and if you're writing code for other people to run then it means more people will have the opportunity to use it (whether this is an open source project or a commercial project you're doing).
ASP runs on Windows and really only runs well with IIS. PHP runs on pretty much any platform you would ever want to run it on (and plenty of platforms you wouldn't) and works just as well with any webserver I've ever considered using.
So while there may be small areas where ASP excels or where PHP is deficient, I think that those points are largely insignificant when you realize the platform limitations of ASP. Oddly enough though, I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone cite this as an advantage of PHP, whereas I come across an article comparing esoteric differences every few weeks.
Looks like this article is full of it. Slow .NET code? ASP.NET can be compiled into DLLs, and at my old job we upgraded many of our ASP and PHP projects to .NET with a large speed increase. Only works on IIS? Try out the mono project.
Also seems like everyone is complaining about ASP. ASP and ASP.NET are two completely different beasts. ASP was buggy and a pain in the rear to work with. ASP.NET, however, was amazingly simple to use with an amazing debugger (VS.NET). Please keep on the subject and leave out ASP.
I'm sorry, but ASP brings Visual Studio .Net with it to the party, and, well, it always manages to get in my pants.
.Net, instead of being one version behind attempting to copy it and feeling "not quite right" in their attempts, I'll stick with my .Net-based solutions.
Until any of these other solutions can offer me an IDE as advanced as Visual Studio
I found the article quite interesting, but lacking in supporting evidence for many claims. Specifically, he states that on both speed and efficiency (not quite sure the difference, but I'm guessing that he's referring to memory usage for the latter) ASP.NET is weak. I'd be interested to see comparisons showing the difference between equivalent sites written with PHP5 and ASP.NET to see the difference.
Also, he mentions (a few times) about IIS insecurities (at posts a link to bugtraq), however I'm unable to check since the site seems to be crawling. How does PHP5+Apache's security record compare to ASP.NET+IIS6?
-- Cyrus (http://blogs.msdn.com/cyrusn)
Well, seeing as how this "interesting article", as the submitter calls it, is hosted on Oracle's site, you'd think the cynics here at slashdot would instantly recognize it as the typical marketing horseshit you'd find on any corporate page.
Yeah, according to Oracle, Oracle+PHP5 (and oracle specific application development) is the bomb-diggity, ASP.Net and SQL Server are teh suck. I'm sure MSFT would tell you the opposite.
This "article" has as much credibility as the MS-published Windows v. Linux TCO studies.
But - of course - marketing horseshit is Gospel here at slashdot, just so long as it says MS sucks.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Another weakness is that PHP's function names are case insensitive. Some programmers might find this feature annoying, though this isn't a serious drawback.
How is this a drawback at all?
In my opinion, it prevents programmers from perhaps accidentally naming their own functions the same as a built-in, which is a good thing since there are so many, its useful to know as many as possible. However "annoying" this maybe to some people, its actually a good idea.
I worked as the web admin to my student association when I was in college, and a job opening came up to redesign the programmers site, bringing online a bunch of new tools for students of that department. This was basically a summer job, and they had interviews where myself and four other students made it through the selection process to the final interview.
[...]
Did they ever get screwed. The guy who they hired was a Korean exchange student, who I happen to think was a great choice for the job, but the problems started cropping up with the ASP code. It was buggy as hell. The system took all summer to code out the object oriented code, and it was never opened because it was never quite good enough.
[...]
In my opinion, this was not the fault of the guy they hired at all, it's just that ASP takes a lot more time to get together than PHP. You can "know what you're doing" all you want, but when your boss wants you to make changes to core behaviours, there is nothing faster or more efficient than PHP for handling anything web related. It's just easier to whip together any site with any behaviour and get it working and stable.
Why isn't there a "-1, Jumping to conclusions" moderation option on Slashdot? Let's reiterate. This was a student body, hiring a student for the summer to hack some website, alone I might add. And the fact that it all went miserably wrong is supposed to imply that the Microsoft ASP platform is fundamentally flawed and everything would have magically worked with PHP?
it would be great if they integrated with the Mono project and allowed the use of ASP.NET type tags to actually run almost the same code as ASP.NET?
Imagine PHP based C#, VB.NET, etc.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The review states that ASP.NET only works on
Windows, which is incorrect. Mono brings ASP.NET
to Linux, MacOS, BSD, HP-UX, Solaris and many more.
Mono's ASP.NET can be hosted in Apache (through the
mod_mono module) or as a standalone server (xsp).
The platform price is also wrong (by extension),
Mono's ASP.NET runs on pretty much anything.
The source code to Mono's ASP.NET is also available.
And I have to say, am puzzled by the "Speed"
column. If ASP.NET has something going for it
in terms of dynamic pages is speed: they have
all kinds of tricks:
* page generation code is running at native speed.
* caching is provided at the control level,
page level, database connection level.
And of course, there is no evidence to back any
of the performance claims.
I love PHP as much as the next guy, but that review
was done by someone that did not understand ASP.NET.
The code they posted to compare PHP vs ASP.NET
talking to Oracle is uneven, as the rest of the
article: in one case it shows data being rendered
from the database, and even has a connection string.
The other example only shows a class that wraps
reading and writing, but does no actual job.
A bit deceiving.
I could not agree more, this guy basically goes out of his way to mention the fact that ASP.NET has a heavier object model and will thus use more memory without addressing at all the point of this model.
ASP.NET is a very different way of programming a web application that has significant advantages over many of the other platforms that exist. A ton of the work and overhead that goes into writing validation functions and other "plumbing" code in other web application frameworks is already done in ASP.NET. Also, the fact that form controls are created by objects means that you can easily create standardized controls that inherit from the built in WebForm objects and are customized for your application. Basically with ASP.NET it becomes much easier to encapsulate and reuse the code that you write for web presentation, which is certainly a good thing.
Having not worked much in PHP, I cannot say anything bad about it and have heard very good things about working in it. That being said, it just seems like criticizing ASP.NET for being slow due to its heavier object model is missing the whole point.
Of course I am not that surprised since is article is written by Oracle, and they spend significant time in it going on about how DB Vender Lock-in is a good thing. I think that shows where this authors motivations lie.
To counter this, we have one ASP programmer in our company. He's been knocking out fairly complex database-driven web sites in ASP for us for several years. He's fast, his work is reliable and there are no complaints. What's your point?
It sounds to me like they made a poor hiring choice, not a poor choice of technology. If you'd given them a PHP+MySQL solution, it might have worked well by itself, but how would it have fit in to the overall picture? How much extra would it have cost them in maintenance and training for their IT department supporting a new or different/additional platform?
Are you saying that you are willing to dish out $$ for an MS product, but not for some other company's product?
The guy who they hired was a Korean exchange student, who I happen to think was a great choice for the job, but the problems started cropping up with the ASP code. It was buggy as hell.
LOL! How much more rope do you want to throw us to hang you with buddy? Did you even read your own post? Uhhh, he was a great programmer but the problems were in the "ASP code". And who wrote that ASP code? pffff. Sounds like you're annoyed because you didn't get the job.
And more to the point, which morons modded this +5? Perhaps Slashcode should be changed to hide slashdot IDs as a low ID obviously dazzles people into not reading the post and just robotically modding it up. Parent post is complete hogwash.
PGP KeyId: 0x08D63965
> They're just another company out to make money
Well heaven forbid if a company is actually trying to make money.
It is actually quite sad to see such superficial attempts to justify an open-source product merely on the "merits" of not being produced by Microsoft. I mean, using criteria like "strong", "weak", "$$" is not what I would consider professional. I good way to compare products actually would be to get the experts to implement a relatively real-life project (like the famous Pet Store) in both languages and then compare the development time, speed, code metrics, scalability, and potential for extensions. That would be a true comparison, not the "metrics" used in the article.
Now back to personal preferences. Being a UNIX programmer with about 16 years of experience, I can assure you ASP.NET blows any other Web framework out of the water. Yes, it is that good. You get a very nice and consistent object model with full .NET power behind it. JSP and servlets shouldn't bother either as all HTML is generated transparently - in many cases you don't have to write a single line in HTML! As a result, you write less code, it is easier to maintain, with fewer opportunities for bugs or security holes. All are considered best practices in my book. I'd love to see PHP mature to the ASP.NET level but it is simply not there yet and even the attempts of PHP 5 to tackle these problems is a step in right direction, there is still a very long way to go.
> You also do NOT have to pay for ASP.NET - you can > download the SDK and deploy a commercial website
> without paying a penny.
So you plan on trying to run ASP.NET on linux then? If you run your web server on Winodws it isn't free.
Visual studio isn't just a platform for developing asp.net solutions. Its a single enviornment that can be used for enteprise server and desktop applications as well. It can do so much more than Zend can do.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If you feel that even the mere mention of a person's race is automatically a subtle indication of racism, you either are really stuck in the tar pit of political correctness, or you have some deep insecurities yourself about the race issue.
Your nickname is "Saeed al-Sahaf." Is that a true reflection of your racial origins? If not, can you explain why your handle is not a racist reference, but the mention of a Korean's race is racist? I doubt you can.
Sorry, we're not going to tip-toe around on your racial eggshell playing field. Guess what? People have different colors of skin, come from different places, and speak different languages. How are we supposed to rejoice in our diversity if the mere mention of it is taboo?
I am just guessing from reading the article but it seems that PHP5 isn't really OOP. More like VB6 when they added things called "classes" but it still wasn't OOP. VB6 just had a bunch of crap for marketing to say it was OOP. It wasn't until the complete re-write of VB.NET Microsoft really had OOP. Seems like PHP5 is doing the same thing and adding something called a "class" but doesn't have any other features of OOP. I know everyone seems to have there own definition of OOP but PHP5 seems to be off by a lot.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Not that any other open source project has changed their license in the past. XFree86 dot org
If Zend decides to do something stupid with PHP, it will simply be forked.
Zend has been around for quite a while. At least since PHP4 was released years ago, if I recall correctly. My guess is they are doing relatively well, and having a company that actually makes some money backing an open source project is a _good thing_ (tm).
It means for the most part that the project will be pushed ahead with customers in mind, and won't die off from lack of time by the developers, or head in a completely wrong direction due to the developers growing out of touch with reality.
There is no reason to treat every company as if they are the next Microsoft. Not every single company is evil by nature. We should be encouraging companies that actually find a way to make money off open source projects.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
ASP.NET (and the Java equivalent, JavaServer Faces) have a much different, (arguably) more sophisticated approach to web development. There is actually a pretty good story for UI/logic separation, eventing, and maintaining state. You can have your HTML tags constituted into a mutable object graph before rendering (example).
The end result is a development style that lets one write web apps the same way one writes desktop GUI apps, and as a bonus you get far more compile time guarantees than before (even vis-a-vis compiled scripting languages like JSP). Whereas in most scripting languages, getting a dynamic <select> to default to the proper selection and remember its selection across page redraws takes an annoying kludge of code, it's trivial in ASP.NET.
You don't have to like the direction MS has taken with ASP.NET, but the fact that the author didn't even mention the fundamentally different programming model it offers vs. PHP says to me that he didn't bother doing much research into it.
Where can I get some of this crack you're smoking???
.NET CLR is packed full of more classes than you'd ever know what to do with. I rarely have to buy any 3rd party components other than for interface-related things.
1. We're talking ASP.NET, not ASP. Welcome to the conversation.
2. How does ASP give you nothing? Last time I checked the
3. It is VERY feasible to run ASP.NET on a totally free platform using Mono.
4. If you think ASP.NET is inferior than PHP then you know nothing about web development. They both have strengths & weaknesses, but ASP.NET is by no means inferior.
Someone MOD this FUD-believing sheep down please.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
At this point, I am sure you are White American, because only White Americans feel the need to bring race into a question where race was never an issue.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Why is this modded +5 interesting, when it's not based on real world facts, but a construced situation where you don't have access to the source and if something like this was to happen, you couldn't fork off the project.
Who cares if Zend sells out? Well, the parent does but who else?
You are only talking about the actual basic framework from MS. There is also the issue of any components which may need additional licenses-- third party controls, etc.
Now, this whole discussion misses a couple of extremely important points. These include:
1) An extremely vibrant open source community surrounding PHP. This has cost and licensing advantages in some areas, but cost and licensing disadvantages in other areas (for example, ensuring license compliance when distributing commercial software).
2) Mono is available on Linux too. And there is a vibrant community there. Mono is mostly licensed under the LGPL allowing people to link to it from proprietary apps. And there is a great community there too.
These licensing reasons are mostly bogus.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP