PHP vs ASP/JSP/Lasso/CF Report help

Anon

Hi,
I really hope that the great community of PHP can help me here.

I am currently with a development team going to start work on a whole string of web-based products, which ranges from e-commerce to client software-server interaction to content manangement. The team has a strong background in C++ and some of the members, including me, have done some personal developments in PHP. We talked over it and decided PHP would be a our best choice over other technologies.

Now this is where the problem comes in. My boss wants us to use more "established" technologies, namely, ASP, JSP, Lasso and CF. He would let us use PHP on the condition that basically, the team has to come up with a report about the benefits of PHP and why we should be using it instead of the others. I can see that his main worry is about the fact that PHP is free and open-source. I can openly admit that my boss has shallow knowledge about these technologies, but he is still a good boss. Here is a breakdown on HIS main reasons of wanting other technologies:
ASP - Backed by Microsoft. Most sites use it, and probably will never "die". Very established and to him, its the "in thing". Must pay for it.
JSP - Backed by Sun, another big company. Since Java is so renowned, this must be good.
Lasso - (no idea how he picked this) Looks good and since you must pay for it, it should be good.
CF - Backed by Macromedia. Very established too. Must also pay for it.
PHP - Free and open-sourced. Scares him.
In summary, he just trusts a technology which you must pay for.

I've included points that PHP is free, good DB interaction, powerful, etc.
I really hope that you guys can help me come up with some really good points to include. If we get to use PHP, I will be forever in debt to the PHP community.

Thank you.

Ron Baker

PS. I also have one post in the Coding Forum.

ame12

I copied this from Randy's earlier message in the forum. I don't consider PHP "less established".

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SourceForge.net's 30,000,000 page views per month enough? Or that DialPad, Ericsson, NASA, Volvo, Sony, Mitsubishi, the US Army, the W3C, the New York Yankees, Southwestern Bell use it today with more signing up every hour? Or Netcraft's report that PHP is the fastest growing server side technology rising from about 1M domains to over 6M since Jan of 2000?

PHP is kicking every other web technology's butt. IMO. And can handle just about any load you want to throw at it. eWeek confirms it is the fastest performing server side technology (about 3 to 1 over JSP pages for instance).

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smarlowe

Simple, charge him $50,000 a year to use PHP. Repackage it under another name, and there ya go. He's happy and you're happy.

Seriously though, this poor guy sounds like he's more interested in having someone to blame when things go wrong than building a good system.

smarlowe

Some more points:

JSP takes more time to develop in, but allows for good code and object reuse. I've found it to be a bit flakey in that the backend java server will just die for no apparent reason, and it uses huge amounts of memory when doing even moderately complex things. But it is pretty fast now with the latest JVMs.

But what happens when Sun doesn't make a JVM for you hardware anymore (or yet). Or it's poorly implemented compared to a competing hardware platform you can't afford.

ASP/IIS/W2K are non-transportable. If Win2k can't handle the load, you're stuck.

Cold Fusion is great if your marketing department needs to build some simple apps, but the code is hard to read, hard to maintain, and feels just plain klunky to me. If you do go with Cold Fusion I highly recommend Linux as a fast stable platform for it.

I'm not at all familiar with Lasso, but I didn't see a unix version. I also didn't see any truly large muilti-user systems in their list of brag sites on their home page. It looks like it already does a lot of what you wanna program though, so it might be one of those drop in solutions that you just tweak a little to make it work.

PHP is fast free and reliable. It is scalable with multiple boxes pretty cheaply, since you won't need nearly as many PHP boxen to handle the same load a Win2K/IIS boxen.

Speed wise, none of the solutions you boss wants are as fast as PHP on a given piece of hardware, and none are more reliable (although a few are close) and none are more versatile for doing crazy web-monkey type things.

But the point to drive home to him is the faster development time of PHP over JSP, the higher reliability over ASP, and the greater versatility over CF. Show him how easy it is to code in, find a simple internal project and implement it in a day. nothing convinces bosses like rapid development.

phpbigot

Realistically, if you want to follow what is most widely used -- JSP and ASP are clearly the most widespread.

When it's a PHP vs. ASP vs. Cold Fusion vs. Perl vs. JSP vs. Lasso vs. Server Side Javscript discussion -- it often boils down to is a business vs. technology decision.

You have to ask yourself a few questions:

Given the skill set of your current staff, what's the best one?

Given that some of them might quit, or leave for some other reason -- how easy would it be to replace him/her?

Do you care about looking like you know a thing or two about 'risk management' and go for ASP or JSP, just because they are widely used?

As the last poster mentioned, are you really serious about building a good system?

If you boss is impressed by having to pay for software, why don't you ask him for a raise and use PHP?

Anon

PHP is quite cool. Well just to clear your things about Lasso. I am currently engaged in development work with Lasso. Basically with 1200 usd.. it gives you liences for one server and together its packaged with mySQL (terribly-powerful) on par with Oracle 9i way above ingres, DB2, MS SQL...etc + its free licence...

ie..if you use it, its free...if you write an app building on top of it. you have to pay for the sigle lisence..

output of 600 pages with searches on mySQL, per second.

lasso is built like tags [field: 'staffname'], would do like <%=staffname%>...very simple to learn. tags is clear cut. great for web-interface fanatics..who dun bother much about code just the looks. and relatively high performace web systems

tons of build in connectors. more from blueworld. cheers..

Scott Marlowe wrote:

Some more points:

But what happens when Sun doesn't make a JVM for you hardware anymore (or yet). Or it's poorly implemented compared to a competing hardware platform you can't afford.

ASP/IIS/W2K are non-transportable. If Win2k can't handle the load, you're stuck.

I'm not at all familiar with Lasso, but I didn't see a unix version. I also didn't see any truly large muilti-user systems in their list of brag sites ....

Anon

You totally lost all credibility when you said MySQL was more powerful than Oracle, MSSQL et. al. It may be fast, but it certainly doesn't qualify as powerful, or even all that reliable, in my book.

Anon

Apologies to the use of words, still i think it is impressive and worth to take a look at for ppl.out there, dev. apps...

Anon

it is out of the question that asp is not a good idea.

the problem of jsp-php is that jsp can be spread over many servers and you wont get into trouble when you want to scale it.

with php you reach a limit some time and then you need a faster server and have to install it again and there is a break uin your application.

with java you just add another machine to the whole cluster.

tobi