Building a Dynamic Website, what language?

Myxomatosis

I've been asked to make a Website for this guy, but I'm not sure which language to use, ASP, PHP, or even JSP.

I'm a second year Computer Sciences atm, and have only being doing a small bit of ASP in college so far this year.

The guy I'm building the site for is going to be using an Access Database.

So, a few questions.
Does the usage of ASP in a website require licensing?

How quickly could I learn PHP, considering i've never touched it before.(not to bad at programming in general)

Which will give me the quickest results?

I might as well throw in this question too, to make a website secure, is it all down to using a secure server? Or how would you go about getting the security level of a website that has the "yellow padlock" on them?

This website my be way out of my league, but i'll give it a lash anyway

Evil Phil

Does the usage of ASP in a website require licensing?
No, Asp (and Asp.Net) are free. However, you will need Internet Information Services to run them and that does require licensing. There are open source implementations but I'm not familiar with them.

How quickly could I learn PHP, considering i've never touched it before.(not to bad at programming in general)
Dunno but look at my next answer

Which will give me the quickest results?
The technology you're most familiar with, in this case it seems to be Asp

I might as well throw in this question too, to make a website secure, is it all down to using a secure server? Or how would you go about getting the security level of a website that has the "yellow padlock" on them?
You'll need to run the website of Https (also known as SSL). How to do that is in the IIS manual/admin guide thingy. To much for this short answer
You'll also have to look at things like Cross Site Scripting, Sql Injection attacks and various other attack methods out there. Google is your friend, as is wikipedia.

This website my be way out of my league, but i'll give it a lash anyway
Yeah go for it, you'll learn loads even if it doesn't go live so the effort won't be wasted.

seamus

Phil's given you a good overview there. You could learn PHP as quickly as any other scripting language, but there does tend to be a better support base for it on the web, compared to ASP. If you've already been working with ASP, why change now?

Website security is something which people could (and have) write books on. The biggest concerns for the website developer are hacking attempts which exploit sloppy programming practises in your code. Actual hacking attempts against the webserver are a matter for your web host to worry about (though that's no reason not to get to know them).
The general rule is that if you need the site to be secure - i.e. if you're handling money or sensitive information - then get a professional to do it. Worldpay and other companies offer payment services that will handle the messy side of web transactions for you.

verbatim

PHP is easy enough to pick up if you have experience with perl, but its quite different to ASP in how it looks and works. So try going with ASP since you already have some exposure to it. Since you'll be using ASP and Access, your best off going with IIS (cringe!), rather than Apache because IIS has a more mature ASP implimentation.

Personally if I had a choice of technoloies, I'd go with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, but thats just my preference.

As for electronic payments, if its a small business, try going with paypal, worldpay and the like charge a fortune and are not worth it for a low volume site.
To get the yellow lock to come up you just run https. But you will need to buy a cert, otherwise people coming to the site will get a warning about the cert.

And the best way to learn how to do web development is to get your hands dirty, so good luck.

smcelhinney

Hmm, I agree/disagree with everything said.

Agreement on going with the technologies you are most comfortable with. What I would worry about though is that anything proprietary (pretty much anything that runs on IIS) will throw up issues for future-proofing. This is the anti-M$ in me coming to the forefront, but maybe as a second year student its about time you started embracing the open source stuff, like Apache, PHP, Linux and my personal favourite Java.

Then again, if you just want to do the site, and wash your hands of it, go for the easy option. You may however need this site for your portfolio, so make sure you're happy with what you handover.

If you are determined to go with ASP, depending on how complicated the site is, I would investigate using open source architecture such as Apache with Linux hosting. You can always use Chilisoft to run ASP (believe they were bought by Sun), Im not entirely sure how good their implementation is, but I believe it is production standard.

How much of a learning curve are you being given? Is it fairly strict on the timelines?

Goodshape

Java's not open source, is it?

seamus

MS's new ethos seems to be to push forward with interoperability instead of trying to destroy or buy up anything that doesn't fit. Don't be surprised if we start seeing .NET framework modules being made available for Apache on Windows, and even eventually a .NET library for Lunix.

IIS isn't going anywhere. No more than Tomcat is going anywhere, anyway. There's a good chance that any web application written today won't work (or won't work as designed) in ten years, regardless of language, so choose what you're comfortable with, and if the technology changes, revise your script.

aidan_walsh

Goodshape wrote:

Java's not open source, is it?

Sun's implementations of Java were open sourced at the start of the month. The Java language is still subject to the JCP, though.

jmcc

Myxomatosis wrote:

I've been asked to make a Website for this guy, but I'm not sure which language to use, ASP, PHP, or even JSP.

PHP is relatively simple to pick up quickly as indeed is ASP. It really depends on the complexity of the site and what exactly you want to do with it.

The guy I'm building the site for is going to be using an Access Database.

Not a good thing for an online database. It has security issues and also it has problems in supporting a lot of concurrent users.

Does the usage of ASP in a website require licensing?

That is generally handled by the hosting company. It would have the Windows OS licence for the server. ASP is a part of IIS (the Microsoft webserver program).

How quickly could I learn PHP, considering i've never touched it before.(not to bad at programming in general)

If you have a working knowledge of other computer languages, you can pick it up quickly but, like any computer language, it takes time become competent.

This website my be way out of my league, but i'll give it a lash anyway

Just be sure that your customer realises this.

Regards...jmc

louie

As jmcc said stay away using Access database. It was never designed to be use on the net. very usecure, easy to download if you know the path to it.

MySql is the way to go no matter if you are going to go with ASP or PHP.

I did ASP for 5 years, then a year ago moved to php and never looked back since. Stil have lots of books on ASP and SQL server database that I haven't looked at for ages.
PHP very easy to learn, different coding structure then asp but you'll get the hang of it.

caff

louie wrote:

As jmcc said stay away using Access database. It was never designed to be use on the net. very usecure, easy to download if you know the path to it.

MySql is the way to go no matter if you are going to go with ASP or PHP.

I did ASP for 5 years, then a year ago moved to php and never looked back since. Stil have lots of books on ASP and SQL server database that I haven't looked at for ages.
PHP very easy to learn, different coding structure then asp but you'll get the hang of it.

mysql is fine and grand for most small sites but bigger ones tend to use postgresql as it handles better under large loads, makes no odds for the kind of thing looked for here though, just an observation. I would not reccomend access for a site, its fine for just keeping stuff in small offices, but from expereince supporting it under multiple users on a small site only 20 people accessing it, it would fall over about once a month at least. Using it as a backend for a website is just silly.

Mutant_Fruit

seamus wrote:

Don't be surprised if we start seeing .NET framework modules being made available for Apache on Windows, and even eventually a .NET library for Lunix.

*yawn* If you want to go opensource, use ASP.NET and host using mod-mono (the cassini alternative) or Apache (the IIS alternative). If you're an ASP guy at heart, possibly moving to ASP.NET + C#/VB.NET/PHP/Ruby/whatever mono supports would be a good move as opposed to shifting entirely to java.

As for a database backend, if it's for a small site, you could easily use SQLite (which comes prepackaged with mono). It's easy to use and pretty damn fast.

There's a good chance that any web application written today won't work (or won't work as designed) in ten years

If it works now it *will* work in 10 years. Look at all those cobol legacy systems still floating around the place simply because they work exactly as designed.

Ginger

If you are using access online your biggest problem will be a max of 10 users.. and only 1 of them can have write access at that point. A massive problem for most people starting out is when they depoly and find out that the LDB file downt get refreshed at all bewcause of security permissions on the server...

I used to lecture in ASP and i would agree with Mutant Fruit on this.. go with the newer techs because classic ASP is now legacy in most case (wow i am a legacy programmer )

If you use the new .NET 2.0 and the 2005 express tools you should be fairly ok.. Tools are free (BUT!!!! If you develop stuff for profit thats kinda breaking the licence agreement!)

seamus

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

If it works now it *will* work in 10 years. Look at all those cobol legacy systems still floating around the place simply because they work exactly as designed.

Well, what I meant is that if you write a PHP script today, then stick it on a CD for ten years, and load it again, you'll probably get all sorts of errors/warnings about deprecated functions and unknown extensions in PHP 8 (or whatever). Correcting it wouldn't be an issue.

stevenmu

OP, I think maybe you should provide some more info on the aim of the site. Your questions about ASP licensing and SSL/Security, make it sound like something you're planning on hosting yourself, or else your customer is. For an internal intranet site this is fine, but for an external commercial internet site this is a minefield and you're better off getting it hosted by an external hosting company unless you really know what you're doing and have lots of money to throw at it.