Looking for opinions, PHP vs ASP.NET

jstarkey

A friend of mine is trying to convince an extremely large organization to move to PHP from ASP.NET. He asked me about a comparison of the two, but I've never touched ASP.NET, so I can't really give a fair response. He is an ASP.NET guru, and yes, I've been slowly attempting to undermine his sense of belonging for over a year, because of that fact. 😃

This being a php forum, a bias can be assumed - we all know PHP is the obvious choice, I'm just trying to get some hard facts for him. Can anyone help out? If you've worked with both, could you share your experience? Do you feel that ASP.NET is a better tool for any job/scenerio than PHP is?

sijis

i'm sure you know this but i'll say it for the sake of other readers.

you can use PHP on any kind of server, Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac (i'm sure there are other too, these are the common ones).
using ASP.NET would be constrained to just Windows based servers. Don't forget PHP is open source!

Personally i like the flexibility of having an option to move to a different kind of server, especially if you are a small company and if the hosting rates change and/or you find a cheaper one. 🙂

Also using php you have great community. There are ton of examples and free code out there, i'm sure ASP.NET doesn't have anything near this big.
Saying this, the rate of finding bugs and its fixes is, in my opinion, much faster.

Obviously, all this can be debated. 🙂
Typical to Windows vs Linux kind of discussion.

note: a lot of this is based on using ASP not ASP.NET, since I know ASP but haven't gotten around to learn asp.net. I've found php much easier to code and find helpful resources.

trooper

Here is another good article for you. Agreed it is asp focused but hey never mind

HTH

gerbick

thanks starks for posting that. however, let me post more in detail guys...

yeah, I'm the crazed out friend asking this question... stick with me about why. I'll explain in a bit.

Basically, after seeing that Covalent has a project that runs ASP.NET within Apache 2.x on Windows, I became interested in getting away from IIS 5.x - offering security on this has become more time consuming than profitable - and get the ASP.NET developers I work with happy until they come to grips with PHP.

As a PHP n00b, I can still appreciate the speed of PHP versus ASP.NET. We use a lot of XML technology, and ASP.NET and XML is just about as slow as molasses on a nice Minnesota winter day. Not saying that PHP is perfect, but I sure as heck rank it faster and better than ASP.NET.

But I need technical help convincing these people. And at the same time, maintaining ASP.NET support, WebDAV usage, XML. But I so rather use Apache and any ASP.NET modules...

the Covalent one is like mad expensive though. Our deployment costs would have to reflect this per license deployed. But not for testing... way too expensive.