ASP vs PHP - Choosing Scripting Language

07/30/2007

David Brown

ASP and PHP are both scripting languages that can be used to do many chores at your Web site, such implementing searches and surveys, generating pages from a database, syndicating content, running shopping carts and interactive applications and much more. If you are running a business you may buy a ready made package and you don't care about the guts or how it is written, as long as works on your server, but if you are developing custom applications, you need to choose between the different alternatives. ASP and PHP are the most popular languages for most such tasks, but there are others. They all get the job done, depending on what you need. PHP is an acronym that used to mean Personal Home Pages and is now known as PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a Unix-based scripting language that has been around for over a decade and is fairly stable and mature. Some PHP applications are vulnerable to hacking, especially if they use global variables or are run in an unprotected environment. Most Web programmers prefer PHP because it is free, and because the syntax is like C and C++ which they probably know and love. Likewise there is a lot of PHP open software available for free, which can be adapted for various uses. ASP stands for Active Server Pages, a proprietary Microsoft product that is made to run under Windows operating systems along with IIS, .NET and .COM, MS-SQL and MS-Access. It uses Visual Basic syntax and can incorporate Visual Basic, which is easy for non-C programmers and ordinary folks to learn. .NET and .COM are powerful development frameworks but they require server overhead. ASP and all the other Microsoft goodies cost money, and Microsoft operating systems do not have a reputation for reliability. ASP is a favorite of many large business sites because there are many commerce, inventory and financial transactions written using ASP, making it easy to maintain compatibility with other businesses, and with systems that they may use internally in running their businesses. ASP alone can be run on some Unix servers, but .NET and other satellites usually require a Windows server running IIS. JSP (Java Server Page) was originally a proprietary technology of Sun Microsystems that more or less fulfills the same functions as asp and php. JSP is now managed by the Java community. JSP implements a Java technology that enables dynamic generation of HTML, XML or other types of documents in response to a Web client request. The technology allows Java code to be embedded into static content. As its name implies, it is an extension of the Java servlet language. Cold Fusion was originally developed by Allaire as a markup language that allows Web pages to interact with databases. It has been greatly extended by Adobe, which now owns the technology, and probably can compare well with php and asp technology (see http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/proven/ ). It claims to be specially suited for cross-platform development.