This post on the JankoAtWarpSpeed blog started off a discussion between PHP and ASP.NET developers as to why one would go for the first over the second.
The first thing that came up to my mind was that PHP is quite simple language comparing to ASP.NET (.NET actually) which is a complete framework that offers a wide range of possibilities (yeah I made a comparison). Maybe PHP has a simple learning curve comparing to ASP.NET, but why would web designers care for data access layer or OOP anyway? But on the other hand, it doesn't mean that web designers should limit their selves just to PHP. Why not be familiar with other technologies as well?
The post has lots of comments from both sides of the fence, each espousing their language of choice. Reasoning ranges from "because ASP.NET is a Microsoft product" to the price of ASP.NET hosters to PHP's open source-ness and the much different learning curves.
Matt makes light of a lot of the things said in the Hiveminds article, including Carl's comments about the importance of PHP and how it compares to Carl's language of choice, ASP.NET.
In his latest blog entry, Alex Netkachov asks a question that has been wondered hundreds of times over - "which framework is best?" (though, to be fair, his is limited to three choices - Zend, Prado and ASP.NET).
I've been asked on the forum about my preferences in frameworks and I wrote a few thoughts about it.
These comments include the fact that eighty percent of his code is not in frameworks, that the Zend Framework is the more flexible of the group and that the right tools, methods and language structure is the real key to making for successful software development.
On the TechToolBlog, there's an interesting little post where Tim Boland has taken three of the major web programming languages - PHP, ASP.NET and Ruby - and compared the number of job listings for each in three different places and on three different sites.
Here is a 30 minute research into the jobs out there for RoR compared to Asp.Net & PHP. I searched for the phrases "Ruby on Rails", "PHP", "ASP.NET" and radius of 100 miles from the zip code. There is no doubt some overlap of job posting but this is pretty clear indication of where things are.
The three locations he picked were Cincinnati Ohio (his hometown), New York City and San Francisco and the three sites were Monster.com, Career Builder and Hot Jobs. Overall, the postings varied from place to place - ASP.NET cam out on top in Ohio, ASP.NET in New York and PHP over in San Francisco.
In a new post today, Justin Silverton points out a PHP library that makes available the full set of features that Microsoft previously only had for its ASP.NET language.
Microsoft has released their AJAX library package for non-windows systems which contains a complete set of client JavaScript components that are included in the full ASP.NET AJAX installation. Developers over at Codeplex have developed a library that allows you to integrate your PHP applications with this package.
The code example included shows a simple client/server interaction with a "hello world" sort of message. The library that makes it possible comes from that's currently in version 3 Alpha.
From the Programming Resources, News and Ideas blog (plentyofcode.com), there's yet another comparison article, but between three different languages this time - J2EE vs ASP.NET vs PHP on multiple criteria.
In this article, I wanted to compare the web application development platforms which I have been using for recent years. My comparison has no aim to make one platform better than others, or vice versa. These are all my own thoughts and what I have experienced during the development of web applications using the three platforms. It is open to you to express your opinions and stands as a comment.
They rank them on a three-point scale from 8 (good) up to 10 (best) and look at things like:
Syntax
Easy to Learn
Platform
OOP '" Object Oriented Support
Performance
Support and Community
Cost
PHP scored relatively high (nines and tens) on most things with the exception of "Syntax" because of some of its "odd characters" to work with objects and classes.
On the JSLabs blog today, there's a quick tutorial talking about how to transfer PHP scripts (without much altering, depending on the functionality used) over to be compiled into an ASP.net application. The real key is in the Phlanger software.
Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. It provides PHP applications an execution environment that is fast and extremely compatible with the vast array of existing PHP code.
Phlanger allows you to compiles PHP to the MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language), use any .NET object in a PHP application and integrates well with Visual Studio.
I shipped the first public release of my own product today to coincide with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. My project is called PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library, a small library to help PHP applications make use of the Microsoft AJAX Library. This is a shared source project under the Microsoft Permissive License, and I'd love your contributions!
The general idea behind the library is to create an easy to use link between PHP applications and the ASP.NET AJAX functionality. He gives an illustration of a simple web service (a "Hello World" type) with both the PHP script and the corresponding HTML to interface with it.
