Does anyone care to rebut any of this? Or, have we already and I missed it 😉 ?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/phpvsaspnet.asp

for example, this:

Additionally, the PHP language is not strongly typed (that is, if you compare the string "4" to the integer 4, the result is true), which causes problems when building larger applications, and makes debugging an application difficult. To make debugging even harder, you do not even need to declare variables, much like ASP with option explicit turned off.

seems brazenly slanted... like, what serious PHP programmer doesn't know the diff between == and === ?

    The article was written by Robert Lair and Jason Lefebvre of Intensity Software, Inc. According to the mission statement on their own homepage:

    Intensity Software is a Microsoft .NET consulting firm that specializes in modernizing legacy CICS and COBOL systems. As developers of NetKicks, Intensity Software's consultants are the NetKicks experts that can save your company money by migrating some or all of your CICS application off of the mainframe. This can delay (or even prevent) an upgrade of your current mainframe, or even eliminate your mainframe completely.

    In addition to modernizing legacy systems, our experts offer Microsoft .NET consulting solutions including Windows and Web application development.

    It's also posted on MSDN. In other words, yes, it is very slanted. Of course they are going to love ASP and hate PHP. I don't trust any review that isn't posted on an independent site by people who have no interest in either side (and can therefore offer an unbiased opinion).

    What is more revealing to me is the score the article received so far: 2 out of 9, as rated by 2307 people. The majority of people gave the article a 1. That doesn't mean that PHP is necessarily better -- it just means that most people recognize biased bullshit when they see it.

    One very clear sign of a biased comparison like this is the tone of the article: Product A has the tendency to blatt, which fargs up the whole process of blah. Product B shines in it's ability to truff, and you never have to pay for it, ever!

    A funny mention in the article:

    ...There are a number of products that can be used to speed up the execution of a PHP page. This is mentioned here because the most popular of these products, Zend Accelerator, works by optimizing these opcodes... It is important to note that currently no product such as the Zend Accelerator exists for ASP.NET. The binary code that is generated by the CLR is already as optimized as possible; no add-on product is necessary to achieve maximum performance. In other words, ASP.NET is providing for free what PHP users must purchase from Zend.

    HUH????? :eek:

    Can you believe the gall of that statement? "People, pay no attention to the fact that you can put together a web server on your computer for free using PHP, MySQL, and Apache. Never mind that you have to pay for Microsoft's products. Zend makes you pay for their optimizer!!!! What a sin!!!!"

    A truly unbiased article would simply list the two technologies, and compare them feature for feature. There is nothing wrong with giving your opinion on which is better at the end, but to slant every statement in the article is just poor journalism. This piece is quite obviously an advertisement for .NET technology.

      This article was discussed here before. Very badly written article IMHO and the facts are so wrong.

      To make debugging even harder, you do not even need to declare variables, much like ASP with option explicit turned off.

      And the writer didnt know that you can turn the error reporting on(which, btw is ON by default) in php, which gives an error if variable is not declared.

        <rant>
        that was a pretty pathetic article to compare the two

        if you were a new programmer, it would obviously swing you to .net, cuz the article it meant to be one sided

        what strikes me as funny is that they complain that PHP has bad features, like debugging problems, and in .net you can turn this fancy debug feature on, wow, ever heard of -Error Reporting, fricking geniuses

        there are many other points where they bad mouth PHP and i am thinking in the back of my head, hmmm, i seem to have had that same problem in asp before (granted this is .net) but it will be very similar

        also this is all presumed on PHP4, they had not mention about PHP5 where duh, the try....catch(javalike error handling) will be available

        and their 4 and "4" complaint is quite lame and petty, considering asp people often piss and moan cuz they can't get "4" converted to an integer for calculation or when it is going into a db

        WOW, M$, way to go you clowns...Ya know they can make an OS, but they sure can't come up with a decent prog. lang. IMHO, and i base this from experience, not just flaming here, i used asp for 2 years while i was using PHP and i hated when i had to work with the asp, cuz everything was so much simpler in PHP

        and another wow, you can connect to an oracle, mssql, sybase db with .net, holy crap, you can do that with PHP and much more...
        </rant>

          I just went to read it, and on the left hand side of the page the frame there said:

          Microsoft JScript runtime error '800a000d'

          Type mismatch

          /library/shared/deeptree/asp/deeptreeDL.inc, line 321

          Maybe if they'd used a better language this stuff wouldn't happen so much.

          Getting back to bashing the article, I notice they mention you can get "up to a three fold increase" from the zend optimizer. what they forget to mention is that out of the box, PHP is faster than, and handles load better than either Java or ASP.net.

          Oh, and in their comparison of database access techniques they forgot the PEAR DB class completely, like it's not even in existence.

            Argh!!!

            There are a few very important differences between data access methods in PHP and in ASP.NET. First, ASP.NET performs all data access through a standardized set of objects named ADO.NET. By forcing all data access through this common set of objects, regardless of the data source, ASP.NET breeds data-access familiarity amongst developers. In other words, once you've learned how to connect to and send queries to a Microsoft SQL Server, you're going to understand how to perform the same actions with almost any data source. No such comparison can be made with PHP since PHP uses a completely different set of data access functions for each data source.

            First of all, they argue that this is a good thing?!?! If you use the same set of instructions for all data sources, then you aren't taking advantage of one database's abilities over another's. Why choose MS SQL Server over MySQL if you can use either one using the same set of instructions? If that isn't a concern, then these jokers conveniently forgot to mention that PEAR offers this ability for PHP. What, it's not built in to PHP? So what? Many of the great "features" of ASP they mention are additions to the core ASP.NET functionality.

            Maybe ASP is better than PHP. I don't know, I'm no expert. But it is very frustrating to see an ASP.NET advertisement pose as a "fair comparison."

              Did you see the "rate this page" thing at the bottom? 2309 people have rated it, average is a 2, but only because a few MS employees faithfuls put in 9s. The most common vote was a 1, the lowest rating, by far.

              Oh, and I went back and got jscript error message again.

                Shall I be the first one to point out that it is a flawed comparison?? They're comparing a framework to a language. This is similar to many comparisons made between PHP and Java (the framework, not the language). Perhaps a better comparison would be between C# and PHP.

                (yes i KNOW they are referring to the PHP "framework" in the article, but thats about as silly as calling Perl a framework.)

                In fairness (and imho), C# is a really nice language, it's the implementation into the .NET framework which mangles it.

                  Originally posted by cahva
                  This article was discussed here before. Very badly written article IMHO and the facts are so wrong.

                  Sorry if I've broken a taboo.

                  It probably shouldn't surprise me that we've already discussed it...it is, after all, a frontpage like from zend.com; OTOH, I don't remember seeing this article discussed. Likely it was in some ASP vs PHP post that I ignored, 'cause I'm already convinced...

                  What irks me is seeing articles written as authoritative by people from only one side of the fence. Granted, some folks have never walked on both sides....

                    Few days ago, a local newspaper wrote about a new bug found in M$ product (I dont know which). My Bro told me and asked me to read on dat. I said, "Well, I can absolutely guess that the bug will allow someone to take over your computer remotely, right?"
                    My bro said, "Yep";
                    hahahaha... what a joke! 😃

                    Well, I personally have tested to sql inject some website running M$ SQL Server using ASP. Most of the time... the error messages help me to find out the name of the database, table, fields ... blah... blah...
                    I did dat just to warn some webmaster on "hacking" possibilities by others. No devil involving here... hehehe...

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