PHP – Poor Man’s ASP?
Do you believe in the title? If yes, you might not have ever worked on PHP. When I started learning Web Development in 2001, I badly needed to move ahead of boring static pages and wanted to learn Dynamic page generation. Obvious answer was ASP as there were a lot of books available on it, but problem was that the Personal Web Server that came with Windows 95 did not support ASP. Win 95 in 2001 sounds absurd but it was that time when I believed that Windows 98 was nothing more than Windows 95 + IE 4.01. Then I found OmniHTTPd in one of the PC Quest magazine’s CD, which had a PHP version included. Fact that PHP had no (or very little) books written for it was not a problem as the PHP documentation was more than enough to start working on it, and so I did. After upgrading to Win98 though, I moved to ASP (Win98 had PWS 4.0 supporting ASP) and returned to PHP in 2004.
Till 2004 I believed in the title for following reasons
- I found PHP in a free CD, while ASP required purchase of Commercial software (needless to say Windows).
- While Windows supports ASP and PHP both, Linux supported only PHP (ChilliSoft ASP is exception). And to repeat, Linux came free with PC Quest CDs and…
- Win 2000 servers had high hardware requirements (plus software cost) while Linux could be installed even on obsolete PCs. Thus Hosting on Windows servers was expensive and Linux servers were available at comparatively very low costs (though on slower hardware)
In 2004 I realized that while Windows Hosting plans sometimes did not had Mail and Image (resizing & conversion) components installed, and if they did rarely they were the premium versions with no restrictions. On the other hand PHP had mail functions in built, and free software library GD offered a lot of image manipulation facilities that none of the Windows components (third party) ever had. This made me think again, was PHP really a poor man’s ASP as I always thought? And answer was No! in fact ASP was looking poorer when it came to features.
And so I started again with PHP. This blog has more of Visual Basic related posts as I was recently more into desktop application programming. With this post, I am starting on PHP and related posts which will follow soon.
Nice way to compare PHP and ASP! I learnt ASP when I needed a dynamic option, back in 2001, however the following year I switched to PHP as ASP hosting was a lot more expensive, and I was limited in what I could do. Plus PHP was much simpler to learn as I’d already learnt JavaScript, C++ and various other similar languages.
For most developers I know, PHP was learnt due to the cheaper hosting. Some have migrated back due to .NET surfacing but PHP is just as powerful, on the web. I don’t know how far they’ve got with getting PHP to compile and run as exe files, that would be very handy
SarahG
January 21, 2008 at 6:51 pm
I hate programming…
So using blogger.com or wordpress is much easier for me…
ShY GuY
January 5, 2008 at 4:42 am
I’m not sure WordPress is the best comparison; any particular WP installation is low to mid scale. Don’t get me wrong, I use WP myself, I like the ease of use, and I make plenty of code changes as good ideas strike me.
Anyway, I can’t agree more that ASP 3.0 ( aka “ASP Classic” ) is a dinosaur in the modern world. However, if you look at ASP.NET instead, which is four characters different when you say it, but night and day when you check it out, you’ll find quite a different story.
As long as you have a platform to run it ( Windows or Project Mono ), ASP.NET is free. The IDE comes with a test web server that runs your code, both for free. Image manipulation is done through GDI+ which lets you do standard things like resize an image, but also super-impose two, use graphic “pens,” turn a color image b/w or sepia, or just have at the pixels individually to do anything you like.
Forrest
January 3, 2008 at 6:04 pm
yep wordpress and facebook are giving real meaning to PHP….though wordpress is not that database intensive…just a few tables…object oriented PHP is fun to work…
Techblissonline
January 3, 2008 at 4:33 pm
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Top Commentators for December 2007 - My Online World
January 3, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I love php, I didn’t know a thing about it until I installed my first wordpress blog and edited the template. Since then I have tried to read as much as I can about it and have produced some decent scripts. I’m quite pleased with how it works and with zend studio as my editor I can do step through debugging.
I look forward to your php posts!
Andy Bailey
January 2, 2008 at 7:23 pm
Opensource software including wordpress have indeed raised PHP’s status and awareness among webmasters.
Jalaj
December 27, 2007 at 6:59 am
Currently I work in ASP.net, I had learned php way back in 2000, but never used it. Now with wordpress blog, I’m getting used to it.
Nirmal
December 27, 2007 at 4:19 am