Programmers: Building a new site - your advice 1

[llamaman]

Hi,
I'm about to embark on building a new web site and rebuilding an old one. I'm used to building with ASP. I am moving to a Linux platform and want to get away from ASP. What are the options that are out there for developing interactive pages, and what are your opinions on advantages/disadvantages?

I need to be able to add things like forums, forms, calendars, database access, catalog references, etc.

Your input is appreciated!

Thanks,
Llamaman

 

[tlhawkins]

For Linux platforms I recommend PHP. It is fairly similar to ASP so it probably won't take you very long to pick up. PHP, being open source, gives you more flexability over probably any other language.
Here is a link that shows some PHP biased comparisons between ASP and PHP.

http://php.weblogs.com/php_asp_7_reasons

Another option you may want to look into is ColdFusion. CFM is probably the easiest to learn and has a quite a bit of power these days. The only problem ASP programers usually report about CFM is that it isn't the same format as ASP, or PHP. Not a bad format, just different.

Here is a link that compares several languages pretty fairly:

http://www.ebiz-intellect.com/page.cfm?onumber=36

Have fun...


Travis Hawkins
BeachBum Software
travis@cfm2asp.com

http://www.beachbumsoftware.com

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

I'd also recommend PHP if you're moving to unix/linux. Most ISPs who offer unix hosting accounts have great deals on PHP and MySQL hosting - they're certainly far cheaper than most ASP/MS SQL hosting packages, anyhow.

Dan

 

[philote]

Perl is another option and seems to be a very powerful language, but probably has a much bigger learning curve. You could also use JSP's/servlets but I hear those tend to be slow compared to PHP or Perl.