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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."
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. The college is very Microsoft-centric, and therefore I should have known better than to pitch PHP & MySQL to them, but I could not pitch anything else because I am a firm believer in the quality of PHP.
I didn't get the job because, as I found out later, they wanted ASP.
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.
Now if they had hired me, they would have had a great PHP & MySQL system likely ready in about four weeks for what they were looking for. They paid this other guy at an hourly wage for the summer and the whole school year and they didn't get their site. What they got were a lot of modules and classes that could do different things, but they all were bug-ridden.
Now I think that because PHP is open source, it's much easier to find ready-made source code on the net, without having to pay anything. You obviously have to be selective, yet there are more freely available sources for ideas, as well.
I would recommend to anyone who wants to get ahead with PHP to read O'reilly's PHP Cookbook.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
What book or tutorial is recommend to learn PHP5 (skipping PHP4, for programmers with knowledge of Java)?
If the proprietary stuff was being replaced with something better, and not just free your argument might hold a wee bit more water.
If anybody is interested, I found a great PHP5 hoster... they seem to keep up to date with stuff and support is really on the money.
http://www.iniquinet.com/
they also offer PHP5 and PHP4 with cPanel...
http://www.a2hosting.com/