ASP vs PHP

Assalamualaikum..

After finish our silibus in flash, the next chapter is PHP and ASP. Nice!

Both ASP and PHP are languages used to build Dynamic Web sites that can interact with databases and exchange information. ASP (Active Server Pages) is from Microsoft and is used with IIS (Internet Information Server) that runs on Microsoft Servers. PHP stand for Hypertext Preprocessor runs on Unix and Linux servers and it also has an NT server version.

Terdapat perbezaan diantara PHP dan juga ASP :

	ASP	PHP
Cost	To run ASP programs one needs IIS installed on a Windows platform server, which is not free.  Even the connectivity of the database is expensive in the case of ASP as MS-SQL is a product of Microsoft that needs to be purchased.	PHP programs run on Linux, which is free. PHP generally uses MySQL, which is freely available.
Speed	ASP is built on COM based architecture, which is an overhead for the server	PHP code runs faster than ASP PHP code runs in its own memory space
Platform Compatibility	Windows platforms ASP can run on a Linux platform with ASP-Apache installed on the server	PHP programs can run on various platforms like Linux, Unix, Windows and Solaris
Additional Costs	ASP such features are not built in and some additional components are required. Therefore an additional cost is incurred for such components.	Many of the tools used in PHP are free of cost and since PHP is open source a lot of code can be found in open source forums. PHP has inbuilt features like ftp, email from a web page or even encryption mechanisms
Base Language	ASP on the other hand has a more Visual Basic kind of syntax that again is closely related to only Microsoft products. So, it depends on a person-to-person which language he or she is comfortable	PHP is based on C++ language and the syntax used in PHP is quite similar to C/C++. C/C++ is still considered the best programming language by many programmers and people who love this language would surely feel more comfortable with the syntax of PHP
Database Connectivity	ASP mainly uses MS-SQL.	PHP, being extremely flexible, can connect to various databases, the most popular being MySQL