Posted by J.O. Aho on 09/26/36 11:39

Brad wrote:
> I know this is a tired debate, but I need to hear something not so Microsoft
> or anti-Micosoft biased. I need to decide which to use in a short amount of
> time. I'm an ASP.NET developer and don't know squat about PHP.

Maybe a perl newsgroup had been better to ask this question if you would want
more objective replies.


> - Is there anyone who has used both *proficiently* enough to give me a
> balanced answer?

I haven't used visual basic with .Net, so I'm far from right person to answer
your question, but wish to give some input anyway.


> - What are the pros and cons of both? Is APACHE/PHP/MySQL scalable to 1
> million visitors/mo?

The bottle neck here is IMHO the mysql, specially if you use older versions
like 3.x and 4.0, this for the limitation of not able to use "multi SELECT" in
a query and lack of procedures. The 4.1 has more support and the 5.x has it all.

> - How does that compare to IIS/ASP.NET/ADO.NET/SQL Server?

Apache vs IIS would more or less be Security&Options vs HackersHeaven
MySQL5 vs MS-SQL would be like the Rabbit vs Slug

The main reason to select the Apache/PHP (you can pick almost any database to
use with PHP, so I don't see much point here to compare that part) is that you
can switch between host operating system with in most cases no extra work have
to be put in the code itself, while if you use IIS/asp you will be forced to
use Microsoft or redo the whole project for something supported on the new host.

As the majority of servers runs with Apache and majority of todays pages are
made in PHP, you get easy task to find a webhost to host the project and
moving to another is quite simple too.

VisualBasic scripts are good if you are locked down to use Microsoft products
(communicate with them) as it's made for this, if you don't have to
communicate with other Microsoft products, then it's a bit questionable if to
use asp or not.

Even if I would be forced to use Microsoft, the first thing I would ditch
would be IIS, there is Apache for Microsoft and you can use both PHP and asp
on it and allows you a lot more modules (features) to be used, has excellent
virtual hosts support. when paying for a SQL server, I rather use something
more robust like Oracle, which has all the features and is extremely fast too.


> - How do the programming models compare?

Both are sequential languages, so they are most likely working in the same way
in this aspect.

> - How do exception handling and debugging compare?

I would say that PHP has it at least on the same level as C++, can't really
compare to VisualBasic, as the last Microsoft basic I used was AmigaBasic and
that didn't have much to exception and debugging.


> - What about caching? Does PHP have a similar concept?

http://www.php.net/serialize


> I know ASP.NET quite well, so if you compare both side-by-side it will help
> me determine if you're observations are reliable or if they are biased.

Maybe you should take a look at asp2php project, can give you some view how
asp and PHP differs, it's a tool that converts asp to PHP.


//Aho

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