In this recent post to his blog Doug Brown spends a little time comparing (at a high-level) some of the differences between ASP and PHP.

The difference between PHP and ASP is that ASP is a Microsoft product based on visual basic syntax whereas PHP has C and Java based syntax. ASP works better on Microsoft servers.

He describes the target audience for each language and talks about the environments that they work best in as well as some general statements about their speed and flexibility. Basing his judgment on the facts he noted, he suggests PHP as the best alternative of the two for being more flexible, running in more places and being a bit faster overall.

Mike Davies has posted a comparison he's worked up between the CakePHP and Symfony PHP frameworks:

Asking around in work (well, the extended group of web developers that used to be the phenomenal Yahoo Web Dev team in London, and Munich) for PHP framework suggestions, the most frequently recommended one was Django (go figure!), followed by symfony, Code Igniter, and one solitary suggestion of Cake PHP.

He gives overviews of each citing things like features, database integration, how they implement MVC and documentation. His comparison is quick, pointing out that the right tool for his job ended up being symfony - a bit more complicated, but more of what he needed.

Ray Cheung posted his comparison of the Zend Framework and CakePHP a little while back to share some of the thoughts and research he did to pick one over the other for his application.

A lot of people have been asking for some comparison articles for some of the popular frameworks. [...] Overall, both these frameworks are good to use as per your requirements. CakePHP is suitable for developers new to MVC and those who require stricter conventions. ZF is a choice for those who need better control over the application design and built-in support for renowned Web services. Both the frameworks are developing fast and the choice is entirely yours.

He includes brief overviews of each framework and comments on documentation and configuration issues surrounding them.

Commentors on the post include Nate Abele (of CakePHP) and Wil Sinclair (of the Zend Framework).

Leonid Mamchenkov has compared Perl versus PHP in this new blog post - specifically how they handle variable scoping.

I've mentioned quite a few times that I am a big fan of Perl programming language. However, most of my programming time these days is spent in PHP. The languages are often similar, with PHP having its roots in Perl, and Perl being such a influence in the world of programming languages. This similarity is often very helpful. However there are a few difference, some of which are obvious and others are not.

His example compares looping (a foreach in both) and how, after the Perl loop the $value variable is no longer accessible. In PHP, however, it's passed back out into the current scope and can be read just like any other variable. While this can be useful, it can also cause headaches when trying to track down elusive bugs.

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.

This new post on Doug Brown's blog compares two of the more popular PHP frameworks - the Zend Framework and CakePHP - in an overview of features and general usefulness.

The Zend Framework, developed by Zend Technologies is an open-source, object oriented web-application framework implemented in PHP 5. It is widely known as ZF and is developed with the purpose of making things easier for PHP developers and supporting best practices at the same time. CakePHP too, is an open-source web application framework used for creating web applications written in PHP. It is developed by Cake Software Foundation, Inc. It is written in PHP and is based on the model of Ruby on Rails.

He touches on licensing, the components available for each, how both have an "install and go" mentality (little to no configuration required for a default install) and which he believes is good for what kind of developer/project.

Jani Hartikainen has posted a review of the latest release of the NetBeans IDE with an updated version of their PHP support:

During the weekend, I tried out NetBeans 6.5 and its new PHP related functionality. I had earlier seen some quick shots of how the support was, and it seemed like a good contender for big names like Zend Studio. What features does NetBeans 6.5 have for PHP developers? How does it compare against Zend Studio for Eclipse?

He looks at some of the basics it includes (PHPDocumentor support, autocomplete, etc) and gets a bit more in depth by comparing it directly to Zend Studio, a look at the project view and the integration of debugging support and version control. He also points out the HTML, CSS and Javascript support that comes bundled in too.

In this new post to the Stubbles blog Frank Kleine looks at the current state of annotations in the PHP language and applications.

Annotations are a really helpful feature in present-day development. An annotation is a special form of syntactic metadata that can be added to source code elements such as classes, methods, properties and parameters. They do not affect the program semantic directly, but can be used by tools and libraries to handle such annotated code in a certain way.

He notes that, as of right now, PHP doesn't naively support anything like this but that there are additional libraries that can be used to augment the standard PHP performance and use them (like a feature in PHPUnit with @assert and @test). He also go through several of the other libraries that make it possible including Addendum, FLOW3 and the XP-Framework.

In a recent entry to his blog Andy Jeffries gives an overview of his site's transition over from one framework to another - away from Symfony and over to Rails.

I decided as I was learning/using Symfony at my contract at the time that it would be a good experiment to write it in Symfony. [...] The site did fairly well when I posted but I still posted in frequently.

After redefining the site's purpose a bit, he reconsidered the language (and framework) choice and decided to do a rewrite in Rails. He gives a comparison of the process on things like lines of code, time to build, performance differences, deployment and automated testing.

On the Hurricane Software website they've done a comparison between PHP and Python judging them based on things like feature set, community and documentation.

What does it take to state one language better than other? One answer can be flexibility, development friendly, licensing policy (open source or commercial), community, portability, dynamic typing, support for variable number of function arguments and ability to freeze live objects in a string representation. Documentation of course is a major player when you choose a language because you still have to sharpen your skill and you haven't worked on that particular language yet.

They go through a list of the prominent features of each language as well as some basic benchmarks for mathematical operations like finding primes below 10000 and looping with a bit of calculation. They compare the two languages' speed of execution, speed of writing, ease of setup and portability.

You can also listen to the report via the in-page player.