Posted by Bradley Holt on 09/15/05 22:35

Dikkie had a very good response - let me add my 2 cents. You said that
security is a big concern. In my experience (at least between the
platforms you mentioned) the way that you approach your coding is more
important then what platform you pick. You can make a very insecure
application on ASP.NET and a very secure application on PHP or the
reverse. The differences in security between the two platforms is
negligible compared to the security issues you as a programmer can
introduce.

As far as scalability goes: most people will tell ASP.NET is more
scalable then PHP. In my experience this is simply not true. If you
write good code and install the Zend Optimizer (which is free) your PHP
applications will be very scalable. I have a friend who runs a
PHP/MySQL site that gets over a million hits a day. He has everything
load balanced across multiple servers.

I don't have a lot of experience with Ruby so I can't speak for it's
security/scalability.

On a side note - you mentioned that you plan on building a big site. I
think this is the wrong approach and you will be very disappointed with
the results. Most of the successful sites I know of were either created
over a weekend and became popular because it was a new idea that people
liked or they were created by some big company with tons of money to
spend on advertising. My suggestion would be to take your site idea,
distill it down to what you can build in a weekend, and throw it out
there for people to try. Only after you see how people use it will you
truly understand what it is people will like using. If you try to build
it all at once you will build in lots of unnecessary features that will
just waste your time and annoy your users.

--Bradley
http://www.gtalkprofile.com/profile/2.html

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