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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.
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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.
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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..
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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#.
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.
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.
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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.