Monday, August 11, 2008

PHP versus ASP.NET for Website Development

If you want to develop a website and you are confused between PHP and ASP.Net to be used as a basis for your website development, turn to any experienced web development company and they will probably offer you one or the other. However, to make things easy for you, I think I should discuss a little about the basic differences between these two scripting languages that have caught the web developers’ fancy so very often.

Well, actually, both ASP.NET and PHP have dominated the website development market these days. Have a closer look on any website, chances are there it might have been developed either PHP or ASP.NET technology for sure.

PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source scripting language. It is designed specifically for web development and can be embedded into HTML. Although, initially, PHP was developed to run using Apache web server especially for UNIX or LINUX operating systems, later the scripting language was available to run on Windows server.

ASP.NET or Active Server Page.NET is a component of Microsoft.NET framework and is used widely for dynamic website development. Though ASP.NET is relatively new as compared to PHP, but it has gained popularity among web programmers due to its robustness and faster performance. However, some web development firms that use PHP extensively swear by its easily understandable codes and better compatibility with the web server.

However intense the debate may go among the ASP.NET and PHP professionals in the web development Limerick firms, nothing short of a candid comparison between the two scripting solutions is worth discussing here to find out the potential benefits inherent to these two languages.

The relatively simple language of PHP has its own advantages as well as disadvantages. As the language was initially developed using C programming language, it’s simple to write code in this language but on the down side the language hasn’t been updated much. Hence some programmers feel it as a monotonous and cumbersome task while coding for website development using PHP.

On the contrary, Microsoft supports up to 63 languages to run on its framework. Hence ASP.net has lots of options to choose from when it comes to programming language. Some of the prominently used languages are VB.net, C#, J#, C++.

Both PHP and ASP.NET are equally capable when it comes to object oriented programming (OOP). Since all the dynamic website development projects are done based on OOPS concept, it’s another reason for the growing popularity of these languages among the web development companies.

However when it comes to support for the database management system, PHP is a unanimous choice for programmers. Websites such as WordPress and Wikipedia that maintain their mammoth database in MySQL, prefer to use PHP because of its better compatibility with the database. Similarly another database management system SQLite is better compatible with PHP as the database is contained in a C programming library. Even ASP.NET performs well with other databases, but it’s more compatible with SQL Server database which is a Microsoft product.

Since PHP is an open source programming language, it’s free for anyone to use who wants to develop PHP applications. Even though ASP.NET is not free, Microsoft has adopted a good strategy to remain in competition. Starting from Windows 98, ASP.NET extensions are available freely with all Windows platforms.

ASP.NET is a complied language and hence it takes a bit longer time to process as the codes written are converted into binary format and retrieved from memory. But PHP is a runtime interpreted language and hence shows better speed and efficiency. However, the ultimate robustness of ASP.NET overshadows the slight longer time it takes for execution of codes.

When it comes to hosting charge, both PHP and ASP.net are at par with each other. Basically the charge for hosting a website depends upon this fact that how much space the website requires. However, if you consult any experienced web development company (such as ourselves ?), they will help you with the lowest hosting charges possible.

So in a nutshell, even though both ASP.NET and PHP have their own advantages as well as flaws, it’s a fact that both the languages are widely used for website development. In fact, many web development sites are developed using either ASP.Net or PHP.