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I started my career as PHP developer and luckily so. I can count myself fortunate to master PHP to good level. Now this helping me automate a lot of things for me, manage a lot of things better and more importantly think from the programmers dimension. Though I have traveled a long distance from programmer to manager (http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/manager-vs-programmer/) and from manager to leader (http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/manager-leader) but still I do close to (min) 50 hours of programming every month.
Today, I stumbled upon this post on “How large is php market?”, a common question in web development world. http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/95-How-large-is-the-PHP-market.html.
Why I always recommended PHP?
- As I started with PHP so I find too complex and not easy to start with. I tried few times and could not get it going. (Though I am technically good at work but still the requirement of IIS and other configuration did not attract me)
- Too difficult to make things happen. I had much difficulty to achieve some of the simpler things like redirection with ASP.
- I never felt like missing anything (THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL). I was able to develop anything that I needed and never felt that ASP or JSP could add something special for it.
- I got a lot of open source apps for PHP (really high class)
- More …
From my previous post dawebmarketing.com
Related post about ASP vs PHP
- I had a technical discussion at WMW http://www.webmasterworld.com/supporters/3595908.htm (Sorry this is under paid membership only).
- Also, I liked http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/columns/hull_php2.html by Sean Hull
- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=php+vs+asp&btnG=Search
- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=php+vs+asp.net&btnG=Search
At times, you may find that these are biased towards PHP
, so am I.
Why ASP.NET is better than PHP
(I got this answer from a friend of mine about ASP.NET, I hope it will be helpful. I am including viewpoint about PHP below each point in brackets). The reason why ASP.NET is in another league to ASP and PHP is:
- It operates on an entirely different architectural structure. The latter are interpreted scripting languages whereas .NET is a compiled framework. This means, firstly, that Web pages run much, much faster. It also means that source code is safer and more robust. (Aji: There are accelerators for php like APC that make it really fast)
- Additionally, ASP.NET introduces a new concept in Web programming – the notion of code-behind pages. With code-behind, each page of HTML is driven by its own compiled programmatic directives. Consequently, the HTML – or presentation layer – is largely separated from the business logic of the application. Although this sort of separation can be achieved in PHP and ASP, it is not an integral part of the technology, as it is in ASP.NET. (Aji: There are smarty and other classes that allow you to do that in PHP.)
- Other benefits of ASP.NET are its full-featured integrated support for XML and Web services. (Aji: There are plenty of Classes in Pear and other places where you can do this.)
- There is also a very comprehensive range of security and cryptography libraries available to .NET, making it especially useful for ecommerce and enterprise data applications.(Aji: I will need to see deeper into it.)
For most, it doesn’t matter, ASP or PHP, it works same
When it comes to most of the clients that I have worked with, the language hardly matters as they used the basic options of the language (which is supported across all the languages). They handle most of their work using a CMS; they have basic application on web. For the basic running of a website, both the languages will work almost same. Basic running includes:
- Having a working CMS with good WYSIWYG editor
- Some applications like blogs, forums, wiki, Q&A, FAQ managers, Signups, Logins etc
Then how can one choose between ASP, ASP.net or PHP
These are some of the guidelines that can help you choose one:
- Choose the one that you (or your teams) are comfortable with. If you are ready to learn, then go for PHP.
- Cost: I worked with big websites that were running on open platforms and it worked good and with less cost. There are many scripts that are available for PHP like phpbb for forums, wordpress for blogs, mediawiki for wiki, sugarcrm for crm and you name the application, you will get a free and open source. With ASP and ASP.net, you will probably have to buy some good scripts. People generally don’t contribute free stuffs for MS platforms as much as they contribute to open platforms like Apache or PHP. In case you are comfortable with investing good amount of money in buying application, either of them will work fine for you.
- Faster development: I have seen that I was able to do faster development on php using open classes from pear or phpclasses.org.
- Easy and flexible: I find PHP more flexible especially to make static URLs. With ASP, we had to make changes in IIS. In php, we can do the programming at htaccess level.
ASP or PHP, which is better for SEO?
As an SEO team, we have worked on both ASP and PHP based sites. These are some of the observations:
- Working on files were same for both the languages. Both the groups had some good website architecture (using CMS, common files, classes) and some bad website architetcure (without any common standards, individual file based coding). It wasn’t an issue to change the onpage content for both the platforms.
- PHP was easy for static urls: To make the website with static URLs, PHP was easier. PHP (Apache) allowed us to use .htaccess. IIS was a lot difficult in making it work. http://www.webmasterworld.com/microsoft_asp_net/3711079.htm (my personal frustration with IIS 301 reditection).
- Faster development: We were able to suggest and make faster development with PHP websites. ASP teams were taking more time (In general).
- Complexity: We found the code of ASP a lot more complex (may be I am little biased here, I am trying to learn ASP and ASP.net now).
Oh I forgot, now Search Engine Optimization with PHP vs ASP
From search engine’s (SEO’s) point of view, it doesn’t matter if the background code is ASP or PHP. What Search engines see and what matters to them is the HTML code delivered. So make sure:
- The language/platforms helps your page load faster with better cache, compilations etc.
- Static URLs and https based robots.txt was much simpler with Apache. This was a little advantage to avoid duplicate content.
Rest, it doesn’t matter from search engines’ point of view