Animesh Kumar {itsAnimesh}

In the world of web development, the option of which development language to use usually comes down to two well-liked choices… Web applications, specifically those relying on back end databases, are naturally being created by either Microsoft’s ASP.Net language, or the Open Source substitute language of PHP…

ASP stands for Active Server Pages and PHP formerly stood for Personal Home Pages and is now known as PHP Hypertext Preprocessor…

ASP is basically a toy from the Microsoft development toy chest and is used with Internet Information Server (IIS) which is a program that runs on Microsoft servers… However, there are 3rd party applications that can make it compatible with a few other servers. ASP is widely used for large companies Web needs…

Rasmus Lerdorf originally designed the PHP parsing language during 1994/1995… Some other major contributors were Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans who rewrote the parsing engine to create PHP version 3… The major NT and UNIX Web servers support it and it is widely used with the mySQL database. Small and medium Web developers use it religiously…

PHP has it’s own language and syntax, the language is simplified due to the programs incorporation of a parsing engine that is especially designed to make short work of translating PHP code into machine language that executes commands… If you were a programmer adept with the C++ language, you would probably be more comfortable using PHP than ASP… PHP uses C/C++ as base language and most syntax are similar to each other… Because a big chunk of programmers are still using C++ language, PHP are by far more popular than ASP…

On the other hand ASP makes use of a language that was dying before Microsoft managed to breathe new life into it… Visual Basic Script is the language used in ASP and was formerly used as a client side scripting language that was in direct competitions with JavaScript… This was back when Internet Explorer was still the #2 browser behind Netscape Navigator… During this era, JavaScript was whooping the pants off of Visual Basic Script with its wide acceptance amongst Web developers… ;)

PHP is very much flexible when it terms of database connectivity… It can connect to several databases of which the most commonly used is the MySQL… Note that MySQL would not cost you a thing to use… But if you were to use ASP, you need to purchase MS-SQL, which is a Microsoft product… This makes PHP very attractive to the independent web developer…

Loading speed is a big factor in maintaining a website… If you are particular about speed, then you need to go with PHP… PHP codes runs much quicker than ASP basically because it runs in its very own memory space while ASP uses an overhead server and is uses a COM based architecture…

In working with PHP, most tools associated with the program are mostly open source software so you need not pay for them… As for ASP, you might need to buy additional tools to work with its programs…

In conclusion, both PHP and ASP have its own advantages and disadvantages… It basically depends on which part of developing a website you are most concerned with… Choosing between ASP and PHP basically depends on your own personal preference… It doesn’t hurt to confer with other programmers or webmasters and research more information on which programming would best fit the requirements of your website…

Truly speaking, I am not that much interested in ASP .NET… All I have is some basic knowledge on C#, Visual Basic and J#. But in the case of PHP, I love it!!! I have been developing PHP applications for more than a year and trust me, it is the simplest and easiest, yet, very powerful and efficient programming language for the web…

Cheers.. :)