I suggest that anyone who complains about having to learn something not expect a long lived and exciting career in the computing industry.

I know PHP is very powerful and very quick. I also see the direction of PHP being influenced by the capabilites of Java. I.e., PHP seems to be getting more "Java like". I see OO capabilites are growing in to PHP, which simply leaves room for some of the same mistakes that can be made in C++ that gave rise to Java in the first place, mainly the mixing of structured code and OO code.

JSP is meant as an access point for Java functionality for web pages. It allows the server side folks to develop robust applications (tha can work in higly scalable systems such as application servers using EJBs) that can be accessed by the web programmer from a simple JSP tag. To get the most out of this, it often means that the HTML person has no clue what the java code actually does. The beauty is, they don't have to.

So the problem is which aspects should you compare, and what is YOUR need? Are you making a small to medium size site on your own? Or are you managing an enterprise level system with web access that is being developed by a team of over 30 developers???

If you say the former, then I would say don't waste your time or clutter up your resume with things like Java. You can be happily employed out of your spare bedroom for a long time. If you are looking into the latter, then the Java model is your ticket. I don't even think of MS ASPs as an optiong, because I like my systems to run on stable platforms. But that's just a personal preference. 🙂

Make sure you are comparing apples to apples.

Chris

    Yes, but...

    My overall concern in all this talk about scalability and ease of learning, speed... is stability. We use Apache and to run JSP here, we needed to implement Tomcat. We haven't gone live with this, just using it on our dev server.

    The fact that Tomcat gets hosed up scares me, despite the multithreading. I'm afraid that once we put our corporate site on it, and run jsp pages, Tomcat will be going down often. (unacceptable)

    So the real issue for me, knowing all the above languages pretty well, except for ASP, is stability.

    Is anyone out there using jsp on their server, and if it's getting lots of hits, does Tomcat stay up well for you?

    Cheers,
    Richard

      A local web-dev company has been using the Apache-Tomcat combo for a while now. Most of their existing work has been trad Perl/cgi, but they are doing most of the new stuff with servlets/jsp. The don't particularly have hi-traffic sites, but they do have many sites being hosted by the same server. To my knowledge, Tomcat has never brought the system down.

      Some other points: Tomcat is good, and it is free, but it is a pain to maintain and configure. Getting it to work and getting it to work WELL are two very different things. And administration? Granted, it is like a lot of Unix type systems and needs little maintainence once set up, but if it does, you REALLY need to know it well. But you can't beat the price. If you have the resources, I highly recommend JRun Server Professional. It can be installed to run with Apache on a Linux box in about 10 minutes. I has web based admin. I also has a lot of cool features like maintaining DataSource objects (pooled database connections in a naming service). It has a free dev license if you want to play with it.

      Basically though, if Tomcat is not stable or performing well, it's probably your fault.

      As a side note, a friend of mine is a professional servlet developer. The front end, i.e., html is done in a seperate shop. She just hands them the jsp tags to use to get the dynamic content into their pages, and it makes for a very nice, clean separation. You CAN put all the java code in the JSP, like you do with ASP, but this way you don't have to worry about someone fat fingering the script that they pasted into their page.

      chris

        2 months later

        if you are comparing php with the immature tomcat, obviously the results will be favorable toward php, especially since php is now on it's 4th revision (with the Zend engine) and has had years of programmer input, while tomcat is still new and has not yet added any optimizations yet.
        However, if you go with commercial quality servlet/jsp engines obviously they can change this perception that java is slow. For example see the results for resin at http://www.caucho.com/articles/benchmark.html.
        I think php has it's merits (such as a huge user base, helpful people, maturity, speed, numerous webhosting sites using it), but I wouldn't discount jsp if I were you. It might be in it's infancy right now, but the mighty marketing arm of Sun is going to make it the language de facto for Fortune 500 companies (if they get their wish). I also wouldn't discount Microsoft either with it's .NET and ASP+ offering. It's actually quite impressive.
        I would like to see php beat these (it's free), but it's not going to happen if we just talk bad about the other scripting languages on an unfound basis. Instead we should see how we can improve php (ie modularization, DB pooling, unified DB interface, ease of extending php, etc).

        just my 2 cents

          HI Charles

          Good points all. My personal view is also to avoid being a tech weenie and go after one technology or another. Resin and OrionServer can both be a charm to work with (thats JSP).

          As for what's fastest (in performance, and also in development time), I would have to hand the hat to PHP as of now. PHP on a SuSE 7 Linux machine with Apache and MySQL is a very, very tough nut to crack in terms of speed. Also, the development time is pretty short because of those fantastic web-ready functions in PHP.

          Anyone who has had a whiff of classes and especially PEAR would agree that PHP can be OOP language as well (including all that separation of presentation and logic jazz).

          My take: between PHP and Perl, I would easily go for PHP on a website (I still have a few Perl scripts that typically sit for the cron jobs). For being commercially competitive, I would also keep my ears and eyes open for .Net.

          My 0.02
          Shanx

            4 days later

            I have been working on ASP for the last 1.5 yrs and also worked on JAVA.
            First of all ASP developers never follow naming conventions.
            so maintianing code is big headache.
            I would easily choose java because at the rate it is developing, god knows where it will reach.

              2 months later

              I\'m doing the math. You want to know what the math says to do? Well, about 80K a year. Sorry JSP, but the blue chips are going to want ASP+. How\'s that for math?

                a month later

                Here's when to use PHP vs JSP vs ASP vs Perl

                If your priorities are:

                Low cost of deployment
                fast development of site
                ease of maintenence for smaller sites
                simpler programming needs
                working on slower older servers

                and you don't mind
                having a little less power and extensibilty for some things,

                choose PHP

                if they are:
                extensibility
                more powerful programming needs (such as server side multimedia processing, etc.)
                ease of maintenence for larger sites
                integration of logic into existing business systems.

                and you don't mind

                having to set up some complex stuff to get it running well for free and needing a slightly more powerful server and more dev time for smaller sites,

                Choose JSP

                if they are:
                Making money
                Being in demand in the job market
                having a fair amount of similar power and a touch more speed than JSP in your applications
                and you don't mind

                feeding a monopoly, working on MS only platforms, paying dearly for the right to do so.

                Choose ASP.

                if you need:
                Powerful applications that will be easy to develop

                and don't mind
                that they can NOT be involved in a high number of page views, or will have a REAL powerful server(s) to handle the CPU load of all the multiple processes (as opposed to efficient multithreading used in all the languages above)+ not separation of content/logic

                choose PERL.

                P.S Correct me Perl folks if I am wrong, your language is the one I have yet to delve into professionally and therefore know the least about, but having it run through CGI the single process per request thing is obviously bad for high traffic, especially on all but the lates Linux kernels where there are problems with the handling this due to stack problems(?). If there's a workaround correct me! I have heard great things about perl and its my next language to learn.

                  4 months later

                  Hi,
                  Nobody has made any comments about multithreading.
                  I would like to know whether PHP supports multithreading?
                  - Mahen

                    a month later

                    Yep you're right there, as numerous surveys etc. have been conducted as to what companies will take under consideration in the future. ASP.net + totally wiped the floor with JSP.

                      7 months later

                      hi,
                      i'm a student in asia country. now i'm doing my final project by deveoping a webpage game as virtual stock market. Can u give my the guideline to choose the right programming language to develop my project. THANKS.

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