Slashdot Mirror
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."
This makes complete sense, looking at how PHP has taken so much of the bloat out of server side scripts compared to ASPs megahousal approach. Add in the fact that PHP is free/open and continuously developed, it could be a no brainer; if the market(ing?) allows for it!
How does one update from PHP4.x to PHP5.0? I'm running Drupal/Squirrelmail and the like at home, and want to see the diffs between the two, as well as understanding how to update them.
PCB$#
free ipod and free gmail!
... I had to conclude the writer barely knows what he is talking about. I am not flaming him, but someone who mentions only the ODBC drivers for ASP.NET and has never even heard about a Managed Provider, additionally puts this in a summary table: ...
Speed:
PHP4: strong PHP5: strong ASP.NET: weak
Efficiency:
PHP4: strong PHP5: strong ASP.NET: weak
has some serious reading to do
I do C# development, for ASP.NET, where I work. I do php development (hacking phpbb), for my personal website.
For large scale projects (e.g. a messageboard), I would greatly prefer to use C# over ASP.NET... I strongly dislike IIS, and I suppose that's a stumbling block, but on the other hand, C# is a strongly typed, compilable language. I'm not clear on how all the benefits of scripting (faster output from looser coding) apply to large scale projects, or projects where things like OOP and Exception handling are useful.
OOP and Exceptions rely on, you know, strong, well concieved design. If you're going to take the time to design your large project, why the hell would you throw away the benefits of strong types and compile time debugging (incredibly useful in a large and/or shared project), not to mention things like unit testing and automatic documentation (things C# has).
The code example in the article makes little sense to me. For one, they use VB... which looks ugly no matter how you slice it. C# would have been more directly comparable, and it should be available in MSDN... but regardless, the code looks almost identical. Is the point that there really is little difference, or that PHP is better? In both languages, it seems you could abstract away the Oracleness of the behavior (negative on both fronts), and you'd be at square one regardless.
Eh, I don't see any real useful comparison in this article. Yes, it sucks that ASP.NET only works with IIS. I'll be happy to run mono when the opportunity presents itself. But this article was pretty useless.
-Greg
Seriously this is probably priority 100 on his list. ASP already has had such a long foothold on server side scripting that it'd take a lot to convince existing pages to change over to PHP.
I do a substantial amount of ASP.Net coding and they seemed to just give a weak gloss over the actual technology they were comparing here. First, IIS & Win32 are *not* the only places where you can run ASP.Net. The mono project is getting better and better fairly quickly. This is mentioned briefly in their "security" section.. which is also a load of crap. Price: PHP has a habit of becoming very perl-esque over time because of the language. Maybe 5 changes this, but I doubt it's enforced. So an IDE that's going to clean your code vs. cost in man-hours spent debugging some "super efficient php code" (read: "looks like perl") bleh.. I'll take the IDE The database code samples *Don't do the same thing* .. but they DO show the people who wrote the article don't know ASP.Net, because they're using the old and insecure form of database connections as opposed to parameterized queries.
Nice to know that both sides of the fence are as equally capable of FUD.
The author is miles off when he talks about the speed and efficiency of asp.net - he simply says "because there is more code and it's OO, it will take longer to run, and that slows web pages down".
Well I would agree that on first execution of a page (the first time a page is loaded after a reboot or restart, or the document is changed) asp.net is slower than ASP or PHP - however on every SINGLE subsequent page execution asp.net is considerably faster in my experience. Programming intranets and deploying/testing them has proved it to me - when the latency across the network is tiny the difference is notable on all non-trivial pages to the HUMAN eye, and the test suite backs this up.
Of course, code execution speed depends to a large extent on the coder and his techniques, but a good coder will be able to achieve much more rapidly responding web applications with ASP.NET than he would with Classic ASP or PHP 3 or 4. I can't talk about PHP5 because I moved exclusively to ASP.NET some time ago due it's superb libraries, saleability (clients like to hear MS and buzzwords) and the fact it's truly OO - just a personal preference.
>4.) Unified coding model. No more fiddling with half the code in JavaScript and half on whatever you use on server side.
I call complete Bullshit on that comment. I use ASP.net on a daily basis, and if you want to do anything - and I mean *anything* - outside of the little tool box Microsoft has given you, you will have to use javascript on the client side and various tricks on the server side.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!