If you program in ASP.NET then you are aware of the many benefits and features that this technology has to offer. While the name comes from Microsoft’s old ASP technology, they made many improvements with the .NET Framework. In addition, the CLR allows you to use other languages for back-end processing – typically Visual Basic.NET or C#.NET.
ASP.NET’s strength lies in object-oriented features, and its flexibility. Because of the CLR, you can have C# programmers and VB.NET programmers working on the same project, or switch languages half way through and not have to rewrite all of your old classes. The .NET class library is organized into inheritable classes based around particular tasks, such as working with XML or image manipulation, so a lot of the common tasks have been already handled for you.
Visual Studio .NET is a huge development IDE that will allow you to deliver code at a faster rate with a lot few defects. It has built in debugging along with IntelliSense, which allows for auto-completion of methods and variables so you do not have to memorize everything. On the down side, ASP.NET uses more resources on the web server so you will require either better server or more servers in the farm.
PHP works in combination with HTML to display dynamic elements on the page. PHP only parses code within its delimiters. Anything outside its delimiters is sent directly to the output and not parsed by PHP. PHP strength lies mostly in LAMP. The LAMP architecture has become popular in web development as a way of deploying inexpensive, reliable, scalable, secure web applications. PHP is commonly used alongside Linux, Apache and MySQL. PHP can be used with a large number of relational database management systems, runs on all of the most popular web servers and is available for many different operating systems. This flexibility means that PHP has a wide installation base across the Internet.
With the arrival of PHP5, you get exception handling and true Object Oriented Programming. However, it still does not support “namespacing” to prevent class name collisions. PHP’s type checking is very loose, which could potentially cause problems if not handling correctly in the code. Another drawback is that variables in PHP are not really considered to have a type.
Finally, PHP is cheap, secure, fast, and reliable, while ASP.NET has quicker development time and is easier to implement because of its class library system. Also, ASP.NET is easier to maintain and includes many cool built-in features. Both web technologies have their advantages and disadvantages. You must decide what is best for you or your organization and budget.
