ASP.NET and PHP

If you are looking to have a web based application created then you may well have heard of ASP.NET and PHP. These are two popular technologies created to allow web based applications to be easily developed. Pretty much any type of web based software can be created using them - from simple websites consisting of a few pages through to large eCommerce applications. In fact this very website has been created using one of them.

So what are they? Well ASP.NET stands for 'Active Server Pages' and PHP stands for 'Personal Home Page' and they are essentially a set of code chunks that sit on the web server and perform useful functions that cannot be provided by HTML. ASP.NET was developed by Microsoft and PHP was developed as an open source project.

For example, let's imagine you wanted to create a web page that displayed the entire list of customers in your database. Using HTML you would have to create a web page and then manually add all the customers to that page and of course update that page whenever the customer list changed. This is unsurprisingly a very time consuming activity and actually pretty pointless in many respects.

What ASP or PHP would do instead is they can be told to go and talk to the customer database and rewrite the web page everytime someone requests it, that means that the page the user views is up to date and accurate. And this is the important part in these technologies - they essentially do complex tasks and produce their results as HTML so the user can view them, but these tasks are performed incredibly quickly.

Which one is the best?

The answer to this is probably neither, they are essentially on a par with each other. The main reason for deciding one over an other is often down to the web server being used for the application or the developer's preference. ASP.NET can only run on a Windows Server whereas PHP can run on either a Linux or Windows Server.

Versions

At the time of writing this article the most up to date versions of ASP.NET and PHP are 3.5 and 5.3 respectively.