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."
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
Also read this interesting article about PHP trying to take over the world. While a bit long it's really interesting and spawn quite insightful discussions.
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$#
free ipod and free gmail!
There was an article detailing the zend release on kuro5hin a few days ago. Quite a good read...
I use php all the time, but php is more like the old asp than .Net. .Net is much richer in exeception handing and allows me to use any language I want. Php is great but not a stab at the heart of .Net. They have nothing like VStudio.
Than why do you bring it up?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
From the article:
I've heard this same song from a few developers who work at Oracle shops - and I could not disagree more! Database independence in your code should absolutely be a goal! We can encapsulate our database-specific features into stored procedures or functions without having to pollute our application code with them.
... I had to conclude the writer barely knows what he is talking about. I am not flaming him, but someone who mentions only the ODBC drivers for ASP.NET and has never even heard about a Managed Provider, additionally puts this in a summary table: ...
Speed:
PHP4: strong PHP5: strong ASP.NET: weak
Efficiency:
PHP4: strong PHP5: strong ASP.NET: weak
has some serious reading to do
The article states that Visual Basic .NET is Microsoft's default .NET programming language. I've always thought it was C#, because VB.NET lacks some of the features in C#.
I'll stick to my vanilla ASP coffee thanks. It's the old betamax/vhs story. Yes, PHP is better. Yes, it's free and easy to code. But most businesses tend to stick with micro$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
I liked the way the article talked about ODBC being a downside, then showed sample code which used ADO.Net with the native OracleClient instead.
Apart from that, the main differences between ASP.Net and PHP5 appear to be platform related, rather than anything to do with the respective languages (or processors, if you prefer).
Don't forget some of us actually like a little bondage from the toolkit, so we can maintain the code afterwards. Its nice to have all the page manipulation code in page_load() where you can happily mangle everything using syntax similar to the XML DOM, rather than having chunks of code all over the place to insert the various dynamic elements.
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 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
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
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.
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 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)
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?
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.
..... so we have no ASPs, but plenty of Pythons!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This Web site is actually managed by the infamous Carolyn Meinel, whose tendency to sensationalize is well documented. YMMV.
Do you like German cars?
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.
Yea, that was really quiet.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
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!
This is a stolen sig.
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.
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.
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?
It may be right that PHP5 is targetting ASP.Net, but I can't say I think PHP5 and ASP.Net will appeal to the same audiences.
.Net and Java are better in this way, things look and feel like ASP.Net/Java from library to library. Even Perl are better in this respect. (PHP is becoming a little bit better, with the new DB classes in Pear, but the core is still very function oriented).
PHP shines because it's not so much a language, as it is a front end for different C libraries. This is PHP's strength, but it's also it's main weakness. It lacks a coherent object model, or even a coherent naming system for the different libraries it integrates. As such it is a mess, and difficult to learn -- though it's more feature packed than you can dream of in ASP.Net.
Both
So even though I'm "born and raised" (as a web developer) in the Unix/Linux/OSS world, I can't bring myself to quite like PHP. It's a mess (but a lot of people doesn't seem to mind, so I guess the problem lies with me, not PHP).
I really can't believe I'm the only person out there who doesn't trust Zend. The Linux kernel is backed by kernel dot org, Perl is Larry Wall (an individual hacker) and his Merrye Bande of Hackers, and no one company "owns" C (contrary to what some might think re: Microsoft Visual C++ ;) ), but PHP is "owned" (read: controlled) by a commercial entity, Zend.
What's to say PHP6 won't be released with a MS-style EULA? Do we really trust the company called Zend? Frankly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Microsoft would start working with Zend-- much like how they have worked with those guys who made "ActivePerl"... MS likes to dip their fingers in every pie, so long as it's commercial-- and Zend is commercial.
Again, why should we trust these guys? They're just another company out to make money, and in this day and age, this likely means that they'd get in bed with Microsoft in a heartbeat if BillG or MonkeyBoy came a-knocking. So perhaps my question should be: Will Zend sell out? (Remember: Even Sun sold out.)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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
For me, one of the best things about working in PHP is the online documentation. We've got:
(1) Thorough, beautifully organized, accurate documentation with minimal but effective examples.
(2) Fast searching. php.net/[searchterm] - it doesn't get much easier to look up a function, short of having the docs built into the IDE (Zend)
(3) User comments. I've contributed a few comments myself when I've run into sticky issues and then realized what was going on. And more than a few times, I've found little code snippets attached to the relevent functions that are good ways to use them. PHP and ASP, in my mind, are both tools for RAPID development and deployment. PHP is good at rapid; very good. The docs are a major reason. They make familiarizing with something like a new extension library very easy.
I have been playing around with this module a bit and have found it to be damn good at what it does. It really makes it easy for people to take advantage of XML for simpler operations which takes away an advantage of ASP.NET.
For many operations, SAX and DOM are simply too convoluted or complex. As long as you have an idea of what the document structure will be like in advance, you can quickly handle documents.
Here is an example from my site of what it looks like
<?php$xml = simplexml_load_file("test.xml");
print $xml->statement[0];
print "<br/>";
print $xml->statement[1];
?>
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Completely off-topic but:
Troll rhymes with Truth: "THE DRAFT IS COMING BACK, National Service Act of 2003 - 2004, S.89, H.R.163"
That bill is dead in the water and has been for over 1.5 years.
2/3/2003:
Referred to the Subcommittee on Total Force.
Casual Games/Downloads
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
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.
Price. Here, we must consider not simply the price tag of the initial investment, which, in the case of PHP, is obviously free, but also the implementation, maintenance, and debugging costs. In the case of PHP, you may invest in the Zend optimization engine. With ASP, however, you're investing from the very beginning, and you're spending for add-on technologies--libraries for doing graphics manipulations, for instance. But, in the long term, PHP isn't going to press you to upgrade and collect more licensing fees. Everyone who has dealt with complex licensing also knows that companies spend time and money just ensuring they are compliant. Furthermore, you have a difference in response when getting bugs fixed. This, of course, translates to time, which translates to cost for overall development.
:)
Yep, anyone who's had to deal with oracle's licensing knows this one very well.
I work at a primarily Oracle/mod_perl shop, and one of the biggest hurdles we've had as a team is making sure we don't step on oracle's toes.
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?
Check out Advanced PHP Programming. Also O'Reilly's OnLAMP.com has a fairly good collection of tutorials.
welfarequeen.org
... if you are comparing Java programming to C# programming.
VS.NET has the whole WYSINQWYG (What You See Is Not Quite What You Get) html/asp editor, but after pages get slightly complex, or you start taking advantage of User/Custom controls, the visual designer is more of a limitation than a benefit. The ability to create User controls is a really useful feature in ASP.NET.
I currently use both in an enterprise/production environment. I much prefer the CVS/Refactoring/Auto-Compile/etc. features that Eclipse has over the few minor advantages of VS. VS.NET also has some annoying bugs, whereas the latest and greatest Eclipse has been rock solid for us.
Also, at home I dabble in PHP and have good results using Eclipse with the PHP plugin from xored.com. It would still be nice to have a Visual HTML/PHP designer plugin (that was free).
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.
ASP.NET is any .NET language, or VB.NET or C#. If you'd like, you can even use C/C++.
ASP.NET doesn't just run on IIS either. Apache runs it along with Mono.
Really an apples/oranges kind of comparison.
.NET development platform is created by Microsoft for Microsoft so developers can write Microsoft apps for Microsoft servers. .NET encompasses windows apps too, not just web apps. The codebase between the two is almost identical - okay, a winForm is stateful and a WebForm is stateless and the UI widgets are different, but the rest of the backend database/XML/IO stuff is the same. I don't think you'll want to use PHP to write a desktop app, or a suite with desktop/web integration. On the flipside, ASP.NET would be complete overkill for a majority of web-apps. .NET's main competitor isn't PHP. It's Java. The way the architectures and libraries are set up, the target audience, even the langauge skills requred. Hell, C# and Java resemble each other so much that switching back and forth is a dawdle (well, almost. I just came off a 5-mo C# contract and am now on a java gig and I keep accidentally swapping keywords). I realize PHP5 has added some OO functionality, but I'm doubtful that it's as ground-up OO as either Java or C#/VB.NET etc.
.NET is a different beast entirely. ASP.NET is as different from ASPclassic as it is from PHP.
NObody's going to argue the cross-platformability of php. Not even MS.
And despite Mono and so forth, ASP.NET and the rest of the
PHP is great, I love it and use it all the time. But for the kind of work where ASP.NET would be an option, PHP wouldn't be. Regular old ASP? Sure, and I'd choose PHP over ASP in a heartbeat. But
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
If you had a monopoly that extended into as many domains as Microsoft, everyone would want a piece of you too.
Many people say you cannot run ASP.NET forms on Apache, yes you can. I do it and many people do it. I found a short little tutorial for you guys. here Here is the announcement from the Apache team that they would be supporting ASP.NET on Apache here OMG, Microsoft actually helped Covalent and the Apache teams get ASP.NET working on Apache 2. Read it This is more Oracle anti-MS rhetoric to get more money in their pockets.
Well, not everything MS does is evil. But their EULA comes might close in my book.
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
PHP5 is a clear shot at ASP? Maybe ASP 3.x, NOT ASP.Net. PHP's library pales in comparison to .Net. I'd rather use Mono.
John Kerry is a Joke!
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
Apache::ASP provides ASP for free. Given the issues the author has with PHP (and there are plenty of other complaints beyond those he cites) it would seem that having ASP on a free platform would be an ideal combination for him.
--
Free software isn't free, but expensive software is expensive.