Discussion: Why Web Designers Often Use PHP Over ASP.NET?
Some time ago my colleague asked me "I like to read blogs about webdesign, but why are they mostly PHP-oriented?". Huh, really, why? Ihaven't thought about it seriously before. When you think about webdesign your first thought might be Photoshop, but it shouldn't belimited only to it. What I mean by "web design" here is a completeprocess of creating graphics and coding to xHTML/CSS with understandingof front-end development.
Before I start I just want to say that I don't want this to be"ASP.NET vs. PHP" article, neither will I compare these technologies.So, I don't care if someone prefers one over another, there are tons ofarticles about that. I just want to try to give my opinion and try toget answers, with your help, of course.
Assumptions
The first thing that came up to my mind was that PHP is quite simplelanguage comparing to ASP.NET (.NET actually) which is a completeframework that offers a wide range of possibilities (yeah I made acomparison). Maybe PHP has a simple learning curve comparing toASP.NET, but why would web designers care for data access layer or OOPanyway? But on the other hand, it doesn't mean that web designersshould limit their selves just to PHP. Why not be familiar with othertechnologies as well?
The other thing that might be important is that PHP was always free,unlike ASP.NET (when I say ASP.NET I mean software needed). However,today you can build rich ASP.NET applications for free. You have Visual Web Developer, Visual C# and SQL Server Express which are all free. And not only that, you can download Web Platform Installer that will install all (yes, I mean ALL) necessary software for ASP.NET development. So, no more excuses :)
At the end, I think there is a lack of web design blogs/articles thatare ASP.NET oriented. Seriously, how many such web design blogs do youknow? Only a few, really. Few weeks ago I noticed that NETTUTS wants to give more attention to ASP.NET.So if you have a good quality articles you can send them. There arealready a few ASP.NET articles there. Anyway I am thinking to start"Learn ASP.NET from scratch" series that would be easy to understandfor web designers but also interesting for experienced ASP.NETdevelopers as well.
A question
Those are just my guesses. They might be true, might be just a part ofthe entire story, or might be completely wrong. And that's why I'minterested in your opinion! If you are a web designer, what technologydo you use? And what are your experience if you are web developer?
Janko started programming in 1989 working in Clipper ’87 and dBase III+ database. From 1991 to the end of 2002 he was envolved in various projects as a freelancer going through requirements analysis, documenting, development, training and other phases. From 2002 he began using Microsoft technologies intensively and worked on large number of projects in several companies. Currently he is working as a senior software developer and develops solutions using cutting edge technologies. Janko is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 11 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.
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Comments
Robert Robbins replied on Fri, 2009/01/16 - 2:41pm
yakkoh replied on Sun, 2009/01/18 - 11:49pm
There are many reasons:
LAMP is free or almost free.
LAMP or WAMP is easy to install. IIS is more complicate to configure. Microsoft can't get it straight.
If you have Ubuntu or Opensuse, you can start writing your first PHP page in less than 10 minutes. Ubuntu even ask you to set a paswword during the automatic installation. MS SQL EXpress takes 45min to 1 hour to install + restart/reboot.
Take a look at http://learn.iis.net/, it sounds like an old IBM reference manual.
MYSQL is easy to access from PHP. I have seen people "100 % Windows and nothing else" using PHP/MYSQL.
For small to medium projects LAMP or even WAMP is probably optimum.
For very large projects, I would use ASP.net. But I would use C#.
davejones replied on Mon, 2009/03/09 - 4:06am
You are confusing free (beer) with free (speech). Just because something has no cost doesn't mean it's free. There are many benefits to using free software other than just the cost.
Besides ASP.NET is not really free. It requires a Windows Server license and SQL Server Express, though free, is crippled to 1 cpu / 1 gb ram which is useless for large hosting environments.
ASP.NET has a nice niche - large corporate environments that are already using Windows Server. To make a dent in mainstream Internet web hosting, Windows + IIS would have to surpass Linux + Apache in popularity. It doesn't look like this will happen anytime soon.
I can't see most web designers giving up their Mac Books for a PC just so they can learn ASP.NET - which is a shame in a way, because ASP.NET has some nice features that I wish would make it into PHP :-)
petar1982 replied on Tue, 2009/04/28 - 6:48pm
Hello,
I think you should be open to all the tehnology that's on your plate and that it serves you and not vice-versa.
Probably there are some more benefit's while paying microsoft, i think you can have some support or help by phone and email, so i think you should have some extra support for you.
Also, designing asp.net pages is similair to designing window forms (only designing) but the benefit of that is it is very user friendly.
ASP.NET website is created in a complete OO language and that's a good level of abstraction, you have all the benefits of a clean OO language, and if i'm not wrong PHP is similair to procedural C language?
I never programmerd ih PHP, but did in C, and the only thing that had a small bit of an face of an object was a struct. After 2 years programing in C...you don't feel good when cumming home :)
It is cross .net language compatible; i can program in VB.NET, you can program in C#, designer can work in CSS, and i'm sure there is a solution for sharing such an environment (i haven't yet, just a noob am i). Probably some VS edition.
Speaking of Visual Studio, it is a wonderfull tool, the intellisensce and drag&drop features make your life so happy. And yeah, while waste time on writing the same stuff again, while this can be part of .net framework and you can just focus on your application logic and ...program. You can customize and override classes..etc.
Express editions are more&more popular, www.asp.net/learn section is good enough for every beginner to start quickly, and it is fun.
I have never used PHP, but i tolled here what i think of ASP.NET. Now i'm not sure, but think that PHP code must be interpreted everytime, and ASP.NET is compiled "once" and then used every time when it is requested.
So, speaking of investmen, if i had a company, yeah it is true, that i could use unix/linux OS, Apache/PHP,..and feel the benefit of free and costless in the beginning, but on the long run, i think you'd be better of with Microsoft ASP.NET -because of the benefits i wrote up, and a lot lot more, so as you look in the future...it is actually less expensive
Petrus
"Firefox keeps me warm in the Winter, Internet Explorer cools me of in the summer"