Posted by NC on 02/11/06 22:38

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.

You are putting the carriage way ahead of the horse... The choice of
scripting language should be the last one after you chose the operating
system, the HTTP server, and the database engine... Once you know what
OS, HTTP server, and DB engine you want, the choice of scripting
language becomes obvious or nearly obvious.

> I'm an ASP.NET developer and don't know squat about PHP.

Then stick with what you know best and don't make important decisions
on the basis of what other people tell you.

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

Probably not, especiallly considering the fact you are not willing to
pay for advice. :)

> - What are the pros and cons of both?

ASP works well on (quite expensive) all-Microsoft software stack. PHP
can be deployed on top of open-source software stack (Linux or
BSD/Apache/MySQL). So, realistically, by switching away from
Microsoft, you save money on software and thus can afford better
hardware, which gives your application performance an otherwise
unattainable boost. You can also use PHP on virtually any commercial
Unix system (Solaris, HP-UX, etc.); PHP works with many commercial
database systems (most importantly for this discussion, with Oracle).

> Is APACHE/PHP/MySQL scalable to 1 million visitors/mo?

Definitely. Friendster, for example, has 24 million users. The first
version of the site was written in JSP with MySQL back-end, but
eventually they had to dump JSP and rewrite the site in PHP for
performance reasons.

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

It depends. If you want to run the entire application on a single
physical machine, IIS/ASP/SQL Server will be pretty hard to beat. If,
however, you plan on deploying multiple physical machines and
separating content servers from DB servers, no technology will give you
a guaranteed edge; everything will depend on how skilled you are at
fine-tuning your servers, how well your load balancing works, etc.

> - How do the programming models compare?

They don't. PHP does not have a single programming model. Suffice it
to say that PHP still supports procedural programming; in most cases it
is possible to write an entire application without invoking a single
object.

> - How do exception handling and debugging compare?

Exception handling is only available in PHP 5. PHP 4 does not have a
concept of exception; it deals with errors...

As to debugging, it depends on what IDE you use. ASP.Net developers
are by virtue of being married to Visual Studio .Net. With PHP, you
have many options...

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

Caching of WHAT? MySQL supports query caching; for caching output, you
can use a caching proxy server, such as Squid...

> 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.

One thing that could be a potential turn-off for you is the fact that
PHP does not have an equivalent of the Application object; different
instances of an application can only communicate via file system,
databases, or shared memory...

Cheers,
NC

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