ASP.NET Vs PHP
Published on: 30 April 2008 By: Ahsan Khan
10 (of many) reasons why ASP.NET is better than PHP?
1. Speed
Just like all .NET applications, ASP.NET applications are compiled. This makes them much faster than PHP, whose applications are interpreted. To achieve the same effect with PHP, Zend and PHP accelerator must be installed on the server, and this is rarely the case at most Web hosting companies. Also, OO (Object Orientation) is much faster in ASP.NET than it is in PHP.
2. More Language Support
PHP is C, C++ style scripting language with older ASP style mark up and supports some OOP concepts. While ASP.NET supports more than 25 languages, but the 2 that are most-commonly used are Visual Basic .NET and C#. Most developers pick one language but can consume components written in any of the other supported languages.
ASP.NET is written using "real" OO (Object Oriented) programming languages of your choice (VB.NET or C#). PHP is just a simple scripting language in comparison to .NET languages like C++, VB.NET or C# -- languages that give you more control, and more reusability. That said, these languages are also harder to learn and master, and might be intimidating if you haven't been programming for very long. ASP.NET, for example, can't be picked up as easily as PHP, though C# is not very hard to learn if you already know PHP.
Another good thing about .NET is that it has multi-language support. You can currently write (or will be able to in the very near future) ASP.NET applications in C++, C#, Visual Basic.NET, Jscript.NET, Python, Perl, Java (J#), COBOL, Eiffel and Delphi. You may even find yourself writing your ASP.NET applications in PHP in the future -- it's not impossible!
What's nice about this is that you can mix the code. can instantiate an object in C# from a class written in C++ or VB.NET. This increases the programmer hiring pool for companies, and improves your chances of finding a suitable pre-written class for your project on the Web.
3. Development Environments
This is an area where ASP.NET shines!
One great advantage of ASP.NET is the Visual Studio .NET IDE. Regardless of what the opponents of point-and-click programming say, a great IDE can make coding much, much easier and even seasoned developers more productive—that's a fact. It can highlight syntax, let you know when the wrong stuff is commented, do command completion, and just plain help you organize better. Visual Studio has a really nice debugger.
4. It's Part of .NET
ASP.NET is a part of .NET, and that benefit is too large to simply ignore. If you know how to write ASP.NET applications, you know how to write ordinary applications too. Even windows apps, if you read up a little on the Windows Forms classes (as opposed to the Web Forms). PHP has PHP-GTK, but it's currently very immature compared to .NET.
5. It's Cross-Platform
.NET is currently pretty much tied to the Windows platform. This is a bad thing, but .NET will become very cross-platform in a few years. Why? A while back, Microsoft released Rotor, a Shared Source implementation of the CLR (CLR = The thing that runs code) and most of the non-windows specific class libraries for Windows and BSD Unix, with source code for both.
Rotor hasn't been built on the cheap - it's practically identical to its commercial counterpart in most important respects. .NET also has a very powerful Platform Abstraction Layer, making ports to other operating systems pretty easy to achieve. Not only that, but the CLI and C# are now standardized by ECMA. And the Mono project, with Ximian behind it, is working on an Open Source implementation of the .NET framework right now. All these factors lead to the fact that the chances for .NET to become cross-platform are very high.
6. Debugging
PHP does not offer extensive debugging, although various products from third parties and Zend allows for increased debugging and testing. ASP.NET includes extensive tracing and environment information that can be included in the page or displayed in a separate page. Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET allows for easy interactive debugging of pages as they execute, in addition to debugging of client-side scripting and SQL Server stored procedures.
7. Error Handling
PHP does not support error trapping but has various error-handling functionality and logging. ASP.NET supports structured exception handling (with the addition of a "finally" block for code that executes regardless of whether or not an error occurs), raising custom exceptions, and specifying custom error pages for different types of unrecoverable errors.
8. Image Manipulation
No built-in support in PHP for image manipulation, although third-party components are available. ASP.NET includes extensive image creation and manipulation facilities (.NET Framework's System.Drawing classes.)
9. Data Caching
PHP has limited data native Data Caching. ASP.NET includes an extensive cache API that allows nearly any type of data (including database query results) to be stored, with expiration based upon time, usage, or dependency upon a file or another cached item. Also allows for a user-defined function to be called when a given item is removed from the cache.
10. Full-Page Output Caching
No native support in PHP. ASP.NET caches different versions of the page based on one or more URL parameters, browser type, a custom function, or any combination.
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