You've probably heard this a million times but...

[IT4EVR]

I'm seriously looking at PHP as an alternative to ASP.NET, or at least I have a desire to learn it.

I would like to hear from those who have used both technologies. I've looked on the web and it's been hard to find any unbiased views.

The one downer I can see is that PHP doesn't have nearly the same GUI tools as ASP.NET. For example, you have the infamous data grid control. I see more than a few PHP data grids but the examples are very incomplete and it seems a bit buggy.

From what I understand, if you are going to run PHP you have to run it in tandem with Apache, otherwise you are wasting your time.

The main PHP advantage I can see in my limited scope is it's cross-platform abilities.

The wisest people are those who are smart enough to realize they don't know it all.

 

[vacunita]

First You don't necessarily have to use Apache to run PHP. in Works just fine under IIS.

PHP doesn't have GUI tools? There are dozens of Web dev tools that support PHP. The thing with PHP is that as opposed to ASP, it handles everything from the ground up.
There are many sites that offer code snippets with specific functionality. But most of all it provides designing freedom, as it does not mix functionality with layout. If there is something you can do with ASP you can do it beter with and in less code with PHP.

PHP will also let you connect to an array of DB's with specifc inbuilt features.

It doesnt require a win32 machine to run, and is mostly portable.

Best of all it's free, and runs on free OS'es and works with free DB's. Cost of devloping is reduced to a minimum. Also many developing tools are also free.

And any tool that can work wth HTML can work with PHP, heck you could use Notepad if you really needed to.

Sorry if i ws a little biased, but this is the PHP forum LOL


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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[IT4EVR]

But has the business community totally accepted PHP yet? For example, I go on to ComputerJobs.com and I don't see a lot of PHP jobs listed. But the number of jobs is growing.

The monetary argument you made above isn't as forceful anymore now that Microsoft is basically offering the latest version of their database and .net 2.0 IDE for free.

I understand that isn't a scientific survey but an indicator of how the job market is going for different technologies.

Frankly I am going to do my best to try to learn both technologies and become proficient at both.

Now let me switch gears. What does PHP offer that Java doesn't or PERL doesn't.

What I'd like to find is a good book on PHP that takes you through some sample projects from beginning to end. Anyone know of any?

Thanks for you reply...

The wisest people are those who are smart enough to realize they don't know it all.

 

[vacunita]

PHP and Perl are similar in that the user does not need to hav anything installed other than a browser to view sites created with it.

Java on the other hand requires the Java Environment to be installed in the users machine. If it's not there, the site is rendered pretty useless.

Now Javascript which is totally different from Java, requires that the browser have Javascript support turned on in the browser. It has now become increasingly common to disable javascript in most browsers because of many malicious coding techniques. This renders sites, that rely heavily on it, useless.

Read this on the differences between PERL and PHP:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/phpvscgi.shtml

And yes the DB and the 2.0 IDE are now free from microsoft, but you still need very expensive OS such as XP t the very least to run it all. PHP can run on practically anything with minimal effort.








----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[vacunita]

BTW, PHP is growing in use in companies. Web development in PHP is growing and will continue to grow as there is an ever increasing need for webapps tht are easily portable, and require very little effort to maintain once up and running.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[IT4EVR]

I downloaded WINAMPS, which I'm assuming gives me PHP, Apache and MySQL.

I installed the WINAMPS Server, I'm assuming that's all I need to be able to use all three?

I'm in a Windows environment.

The wisest people are those who are smart enough to realize they don't know it all.

 

[vacunita]

Never heard of WINAMPS I think you mean XAMPP,or EASYPHP.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[IT4EVR]

Oops, sorry, it's calle WAMPServer...

http://www.en.wampserver.com/

The wisest people are those who are smart enough to realize they don't know it all.

 

[tiamat2012]

There are a variety of different makes of a WAMP combination, it probably works just as well.

For me, I use EasyPHP on a USB device and phpdev (AMP) on my computer.

That should be all you have to do (providing it's a normal WAMP or AMP program) and then put your files in the

http://www folder.

Do you know what version of php you have?

If you don't, create a page with

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

and that will display it.

-Kerry

 

[IT4EVR]

This is what I got with the default page in the

http://www root...

Apache/2.0.55 (Win32)

PHP version :5.1.2 Loaded extensions :
bcmath, calendar, com_dotnet, ctype, date, ftp, iconv, odbc, pcre, Reflection, session, libxml, standard, tokenizer, zlib, SimpleXML, dom, SPL, wddx, xml, xmlreader, xmlwriter, apache2handler, mbstring, mysql, mysqli, PDO, pdo_sqlite, SQLite

MySQL version :5.0.18-nt

I also have IIS installed on this machine. I'm assuming I have to shut down the IIS Server before I can use Apache and vice versa.

The wisest people are those who are smart enough to realize they don't know it all.

 

[skiflyer]

IMO it's worth your efforts to learn how to setup PHP + PEAR on your machine from scratch once you decide you really want to learn PHP.

Especially with your desire for plug-in solutions. If you've learned to set it up yourself, you'll have no trouble learning to add PEAR packages, which, once you get them going are invaluable.

To your original question, I believe I'm relatively unbiased as my company runs plenty of open source and plenty of closed source development tools... here's my summary for what each tech has going for it.

ASP.NET : VisualStudio... I don't care what anyone says, VS is the best IDE on the market by a long shot. And with the .NET libraries you can get alot done incredibly quickly and well. Especially if you're talking about making a good enough web page that doesn't rely on your design skills and you need it quick.

PHP : Portability, speed (dunno if this is true anymore, used to be much faster though), raw access.

IMO, portability is a huge factor in web programming... I understand that linux for the desktop may not have taken hold, but in that same vein I don't believe Windows for the rentable webserver has taken hold. So having code that runs where my favorite databases are most comfortable, where my mailserver is most comfortable, etc. is something I really appreciate.

One last comment, if you're a .NET programmer, you probably thrive on the IDE... you may want to give Zend's PHP IDE a try, it's not exactly VS, but it's really good. And if you're going to do any webservice work to connect a PHP server to .NET clients the Zend WSDL generator + the .NET Webservice system makes things a snap.

Last last comment... you can run Apache & IIS side by side, I think it requires putting one on a different port, haven't done it in ages though and determined it wasn't worth the hassle.

 

[vacunita]

O.k that means its running. Start creating PHP scripts. Don't forget though, you can open the .php files by double clicing them and expect them tu run. Place them all in the

http://WWW root

folder, and access them via, the localhost.
i.e.

http://localhost/somepage.php.

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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.