php vs asp

cornbread

k there has been plenty of comments on php be faster and more robust than asp. what i want to know is why? what makes it faster/more robust (aside from "because Microsoft sucks") if you got answers let me know.

thanks

polson

Check out this thread :

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general&m=96477004729802&w=2

And :

http://php.weblogs.com/php_vs_asp

Anon

I don't necessarily think it is any faster or robust, although that is not based on any hard-fast numbers; only my experience. I chose PHP because I don't want to be tied to a particular operating system or server.

I've played the Microsoft game before. It's not fun. You buy a piece of software. It works OK, but it's just missing that one little feature you really need. In order to gain that functionality, you have to buy an add-on. About that time, the first piece of software has been made obsolete, and is no longer supported, so you end up having to buy an upgrade. Unfortunately, that upgrade is not compatible with the old add-on, so you end up repurchasing it. Imagine this scenario going on indefinitely into the future and you too can appreciate the joy of proprietary solutions.

Anon

I might add to your notes, Like I do programming in VBscript. I tried to use the new version of VBscript v5 - But this will only work with Windows 2000 and not Windows NT, and thus I have to support two systems using the same language!

Anon

I used to develop in ASP, but I will NEVER go back. Some reasons why:

extended library. Just trying to do date manipulation and formatting takes too much time in ASP, php has all sorts of functions for doing this
native db drivers. Everything in ASP is done thru odbc, which means an extra layer that slows down queries. While theoretically you can port your app to another db, it doesn't always work this way.
OO capabilities. OO is a nice thing the more you use it, but ASP has no ability to do this within the language. If you want, you can write com/active x, but thats a total pita.
SYNTAX! If you are using VBScript w/ ASP, it looks like crap. I used to program in VB at other jobs, but between all these languages, the syntax just looks so lame if ... end if.. etc..
open source.. always a plus.

im sure there are more reasons, but I'm kinda busy to think about it at great length 🙂

Anon

I should correct you here. the VBscript version 5 does allow you to create classes

Anon

Sorry. Like I said, I haven't used ASP in a while, so I haven't kept up.. Thanks for the correction.

Anon

ASP is inherently slower because it supports so many different languages. PHP gets some code and executes it; whereas ASP gets some code then has to decide whether it is vbscript or active x or javascript or whatever and choose an appropriate parser then has to open that parser and /then/ it executes the code.

Anon

That was awesome bpopp 🙂

bpopp wrote:

Anon

I've done a bit of work with ASP (VBscript) and the syntax made me feel like it was 1976. PHP is a much nicer, clearer more modern language. It does have OO support although php's OO support is almost featureless and gets very annoying at times. PHP4 + optimizer is a lot faster than ASP(about 10-30% as I remember) and those were independant benchmarks.

Why do so many people use ASP if it is so inferior to PHP? I would have thought most IT dept. heads would have caught on now. But almost every web developer job asks for ASP + Visual Basic + SQL Server. Rarely will you see a job for PHP + Oracle/Mysql... No Microsoft doesn't suck but Windows does.

So if you want a job go ASP, if you want a simple fast language that enables you to make complex scripts with less code use PHP, and if you want a really well designed properly OO language use Python. Python kicks butt!
Boy have I gone off topic... anyway that was just my 3 paragraphs, bye!

Billy