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Posted by Colin McKinnon on 05/06/06 16:38
Nate Baxley wrote:
> There's no question that we need to get away from ASP. I've gone down
> the ASP.NET road and found it very cumbersome for the work that we do.
> We basically are creating lots and lots of CRUD calls for directories,
> news, inventories, etc. I've used PHP in my background and was happy
> with it. The Object Oriented functionality new to PHP since I used it
> also has me intrigued. We are basically a MS shop currently in the
> sense that our server is Windows 2003 and our DB is SQL Server.
> However, all of our development is done with Dreamweaver and we're not
> really tied into MS so much that we can't leave. For now I'm doing
> testing with PHP on our Windows box and accessing SQL Server with
> little trouble. I don't know that I want to leave SQL Server for
> MySQL, although I might consider using PostgreSQL. We are a very small
> shop but looking to expand. I am currently the only true programmer,
> so that side of things isn't a problem. Any comments?
As other people have mentioned, there are big companies running PHP (Yahoo,
Honda) but sometimes it's also worth noting what other organisations are
using it too (e.g. SANS for one). Did you try asking what large companies
are running ASP?
Regards the finger pointing thing....have you ever dealt with Microsoft to
get an issue resolved - I've tried. If you're lucky, it will be a security
problem - if you publish the details then you may get a fix in a few
months. OTOH, with FOSS software on several occasions I've been able to
fully characterize the problem and in some cases write a fix myself. Where
I've gone back to the developer, I've seen very quick turnaround. One
exception to this is with a problem in the RedHat's Anaconda, round about
7.something. They behaved in a very Microsoftish way, denying any sort of
bug ("it's supposed to work that way") although admittedly they fixed it in
the next release. More recently I've been running SuSE on my servers and
found little to complain about.
I suggest you also take the time to read the licences that came with your
existing software. If your software destroys all your files, eats your
first-born, rapes your girlfriend and steals your car, Microsoft will only
offer you a refund on what you paid for it (but you've got to stop using
it).
Searching Amazon for C# gives about 514 hits. PHP gives 655 hits. For
Google, searching for PHP in the body of the page (not URL) returns about 1
billion hits. ASP, half that, C# about 100 million. In the URL, Google
finds about 4 billion for PHP, and 3 billion for ASP. See also
http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
If having commercial backing provides a security blanket for your customers,
you can buy PHP support from Oracle, IBM and Zend.
IME, ASP is too limited for building real applications and sooner or later
you start adding in bits to solve problems. So it's worth also taking the
time to note where you have had to buy in additional ActiveX or COM objects
to solve problems using ASP. While the capital cost may not have been
significant, what about the TCO? Where is the accountability?
As for the DB question...PHP will work with MS-SQL server, although since
you're breaking your lock-in to Microsoft, there's little reason to retain
MS on your webserver OS. OTOH from a Linux box it's bit more tricky to
connect to a MS-SQL Server backend (Microsoft's systems are very hard to
integrate with other vendor solutions except where they (try) to apply open
standards) but in no way impossible. You might want to consider Sybase as
an alternative DBMS - IIRC MS SQL Server started off as a port of Sybase
with some GUI bolt ons.
HTH
C.
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