Advice - PHP or ASP.NET?

joeKel73

I'm starting into a web development project which I'll be at for the next few months in college. The application will taken a large uploaded file, split it into hundreds of smaller files, then convert these to an xml format.

I've some experience with both ASP.NET and PHP and could do it with either. I'm curious if you more experienced developers would suggest one over the other?

Of course I'll be looking into both myself too, but would welcome the advice.

Thanks

cusackd

If you want a lot of support and help my personal opinion would be to go with php as their are more resources out there for php.

joeKel73

Thanks. Are there any industry trends that I should be aware of? Even if it's not one of the above. I'll be looking for work next August and would be good to have applied experience with something in demand...

cusackd

foto joe wrote: »

Thanks. Are there any industry trends that I should be aware of? Even if it's not one of the above. I'll be looking for work next August and would be good to have applied experience with something in demand...

PHP HTML/5 MySQL and Java Script are the things i use regularly.

jk86

Well, people who use php are going to suggest php and .net people are going to suggest asp.net

As a .net guy, I suggest asp.net...

Adam

jk86 wrote: »

Well, people who use php are going to suggest php and .net people are going to suggest asp.net

As a .net guy, I suggest asp.net...

what about those who know both?

Giblet

Adam wrote: »

what about those who know both?

Prob .net

joeKel73

Thanks! What's the reasons for picking one over the other?

donutface

I know both PHP and ASP.net.

I'd personally pick ASP.net, you've got a quick UI designer with Visual Studio where you can literately just place a text box and button on a page, double click the button and write code for it. No messy isset and $_POST variables to deal with. Your code immediately becomes more structured and easy to read (everything is put in callback functions for you).

There are plenty of resources available for ASP.net, you are not just limited to ASP.net specific resources but C# in general. The entire MSDN and every other C# discussion forum is right at your fingertips.

Finally (and this is something I'm not sure of about PHP), you've got a good debugger. You can go and place a breakpoint anywhere in your code, hit play, trace through code step by step and even fiddle around with in memory variables. This will dramatically speed up development.

About the only negative thing about ASP.net its hosting cost generally being higher than PHP counterparts - but if its just a college project you're working on this probably isn't something to worry about.

Colonel Panic

My host, who I won't mention by name charges the same for Windows and Linux shared hosting. They support .Net 4.0 and ASP.Net MVC 3.

joeKel73

Yeah I think I'm looking at the same host... Already have a shared linux account with them with a few sites on it, happy to invest in a windows account though if it looks like the better option.

Placebo

i use php, arnt alot of free source/third party 'software' and services written in php or php frameworks, like wordpress? alot of API's [flickr/tumblr] also support php.

conorcan2

I'm a PHP programmer.

I'd go with ASP.NET if you'd like to build up your portfolio with a view to getting a job. There are more advertised for ASP.NET than PHP.

desaparecidos

The majority of sites developed in ASP.NET are ****. The language itself does some awfully dumb things by default, and you have to go out of your way to tell it not to do that.

But the main reason sites developed with ASP.NET are **** is because the vast majority of ASP.NET developers are incompetent. I don't know how they got into their jobs, probably because companies insist on employing "software engineers" for web development, despite these software engineers not having any exposure to any web technologies.

A lot of ASP.NET developers seems to be totally ignorant of basic HTML and CSS, or even the simple concept of server and client. The result of this is brutally inefficient and badly coded websites / web applications.

If you go down the ASP.NET career path, you'll end up day in day out contributing to **** projects with **** colleagues.

If you go down the PHP path, you'll more than likely work on nice projects and talented knowledgeable colleagues.

So to answer your question, do it in PHP. You'll get a much rounder core knowledge of all things web (PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript) than you would with ASP.NET. With a PHP page you start off with nothing. A blank page. Perfect for learning.

With ASP.NET you have to learn things the ASP.NET way, not the right way.

Giblet

A bit over the top, but I hate ASP.NET Webforms, but stuff like MVC is leagues better than any other offering. You also have complete control over everything that's rendered. As for your comment about "core knowledge".Well let's just say that it's agnostic to anything else, and most people know **** about DOM programming... blank pages except jquery, some plugins maybe a reset.css and some other crap that isn't needed?

conor.hogan.2

MVC is not special to asp.net.

Giblet

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

MVC is not special to asp.net.

I'm talking about .net asp mvc of course... Their particular implementation is very good, far more impressive than spring or anything else I've seen

conor.hogan.2

Ok, I dont know the ins and outs of it. Maybe you could tout some of the benefits it has over normal mvc?

Giblet

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

Ok, I dont know the ins and outs of it. Maybe you could tout some of the benefits it has over normal mvc?

MVC is a architecture framework that requires implementation, so there is no "normal MVC", you get to use .NET in this implementation so it has the advantage to be able to use a strongly typed powerful language. It has native dependency resolvers, really nice custom filtering and binding and other easily wireable providers, and leverages the Razor view engine. Also, it wires a lot of stuff automatically for people who like to get non-obtrusive ajax up and running quickly and can use jQuery.

Colonel Panic

Of all the MVC frameworks I've used over the years, ASP.Net MVC is easily the best.

Crappy ASP.Net websites are the result of crappy programmers. The same goes for PHP (without even getting into how awful the language itself actually is).

John_Mc

desaparecidos wrote: »

The majority of sites developed in ASP.NET are ****. The language itself does some awfully dumb things by default, and you have to go out of your way to tell it not to do that.

But the main reason sites developed with ASP.NET are **** is because the vast majority of ASP.NET developers are incompetent. I don't know how they got into their jobs, probably because companies insist on employing "software engineers" for web development, despite these software engineers not having any exposure to any web technologies.

A lot of ASP.NET developers seems to be totally ignorant of basic HTML and CSS, or even the simple concept of server and client. The result of this is brutally inefficient and badly coded websites / web applications.

If you go down the ASP.NET career path, you'll end up day in day out contributing to **** projects with **** colleagues.

If you go down the PHP path, you'll more than likely work on nice projects and talented knowledgeable colleagues.

So to answer your question, do it in PHP. You'll get a much rounder core knowledge of all things web (PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript) than you would with ASP.NET. With a PHP page you start off with nothing. A blank page. Perfect for learning.

With ASP.NET you have to learn things the ASP.NET way, not the right way.

What a ridiculous generalising statement. Most Asp.net developers are incompetent and most PHP developers are nice and competent. Is my interpretation correct?

I hope not because you're talking through your a*se :rolleyes:

I would agree that Webforms is horrendous and produces horrible, horrible markup. You're always going to get downsides when you re-engineer the web to work like a desktop application (in terms of developing for it).

ASP.net MVC is absolutely fantastic though. Version 3.0 really is a joy to use, and when you tie it in with Entity Framework 4.1, you can rapidly develop applications without having to spend time on the mundane and time consuming tasks you'd expect

Malice

The language itself does some awfully dumb things by default, and you have to go out of your way to tell it not to do that.

desaparecidos I think you're the first person I've come across who says this about ASP.NET but fails to see that PHP is as bad if not worse! Remember the register_globals mess that's probably still being cleaned up around the world? Or what about PHP's maddening inconsistent function naming convention? Is it do_stuff(), doStuff(), DoStuff() or some other format entirely?

Giblet

Malice wrote: »

desaparecidos I think you're the first person I've come across who says this about ASP.NET but fails to see that PHP is as bad if not worse! Remember the register_globals mess that's probably still being cleaned up around the world? Or what about PHP's maddening inconsistent function naming convention? Is it do_stuff(), doStuff(), DoStuff() or some other format entirely?

I'd actually like to know what specific case he is talking about.

Robdude

I'm a .Net developer in my day job but I've never liked ASP.NET very much.

I really enjoy working with .NET code and the .NET framework. I've done a lot of VB.NET and C# and I like them both (and a tiny bit of F# which I love, but still don't really know). I develop in Visual Studio and think it's a great IDE (but I've used a handful of others, primarily Eclipse). There are a lot of really good stuff .NET has going for it.

But I *dont* like ASP.NET.

Maybe it's because I learned ASP first...I don't know. I understand a lot of the motivation behind the way things are in ASP.NET but it never felt quite right to me.

I've never done any professional ASP.NET work where I was responsible for any real front-end development; it's possible I just don't have enough experience to appreciate the benefits. The ASP.NET probject I did work on commericially was very large and most of my work was deep inside the business layer and some web services stuff.

I don't know how closely you've looked at either - but you might want to give each a quick try and just see what you 'like'.

Malice

Robdude, what specifically don't you like about ASP.NET compared to Classic ASP?

8k2q1gfcz9s5d4

desaparecidos wrote: »

The majority of sites developed in ASP.NET are ****. The language itself does some awfully dumb things by default, and you have to go out of your way to tell it not to do that.

But the main reason sites developed with ASP.NET are **** is because the vast majority of ASP.NET developers are incompetent. I don't know how they got into their jobs, probably because companies insist on employing "software engineers" for web development, despite these software engineers not having any exposure to any web technologies.

A lot of ASP.NET developers seems to be totally ignorant of basic HTML and CSS, or even the simple concept of server and client. The result of this is brutally inefficient and badly coded websites / web applications.

If you go down the ASP.NET career path, you'll end up day in day out contributing to **** projects with **** colleagues.

If you go down the PHP path, you'll more than likely work on nice projects and talented knowledgeable colleagues.

So to answer your question, do it in PHP. You'll get a much rounder core knowledge of all things web (PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript) than you would with ASP.NET. With a PHP page you start off with nothing. A blank page. Perfect for learning.

With ASP.NET you have to learn things the ASP.NET way, not the right way.

That is the greatest load of bull I have ever heard.
Classic ASP.NET itsnt the best, but .NET MVC is becoming very popular, and is far superior to ASP.NET.

I dont get your dig at .Net developers:
A lot of ASP.NET developers seems to be totally ignorant of basic HTML and CSS, or even the simple concept of server and client. The result of this is brutally inefficient and badly coded websites / web applications.

you mean to say ALL php developers code their HTML, CSS and Jquery correctly?

If you go down the ASP.NET career path, you'll end up day in day out contributing to **** projects with **** colleagues.

???


So to answer your question, do it in PHP. You'll get a much rounder core knowledge of all things web (PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript) than you would with ASP.NET. With a PHP page you start off with nothing. A blank page. Perfect for learning.

Disagree, none is better than the other for teaching CSS, HTML or JavaScript.

you shoud look at .NET MVC 3.0, I used the Zend framework with php, and Ruby on Rails in the past, .NET MVC 3.0 towers over them

joeKel73

Thanks for the responses, I'm keeping an eye on them as they come. Seems to be a touchy subject...

Robdude

Malice wrote: »

Robdude, what specifically don't you like about ASP.NET compared to Classic ASP?

I hope this doesn't come out the wrong way - I know there are a lot of great aspects to ASP.NET...

but whenever I'm writting a website it's just easier for me to think of it as, 'Okay, a client wants to see a page and that's just a big string of HTML that I'm going to build up'.

I always want to do stuff like this...

<p><% GenerateCoolContent() %></p>

And

void GenerateCoolContent()
{
Response.Write("This is cool!");
}

Instead of thinking of it as a page 'object' with events and a lifecycle. In ASP - the above approach was fine; and while you can still do that in ASP.NET it's like using a 'goto' - everyone says 'Don't do that!'.

In ASP.NET it should be something like:
<p><asp:label id="label1" runat="server" /></p>

and

<asp:label id="lbl1" runat="server" />
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
label1.Text = "Here is some cool stuff";
}

The ASP.NET approach really does give you a lot of cool stuff to work with and it seems like it does a lot to prevent bad habits...but sometimes it feels like more work for the things I want to do (even if it isn't, it just *feels* like it, IMHO).

But I fully admit there are certain problems that are real pains to deal with in ASP that ASP.NET seems to provide for you - which is awesome. Still, I just like working with ASP better than ASP.NET.

I haven't really used PHP, but from the little I understand of it, it's a lot more comparable to ASP than ASP.NET; so I think I would enjoy it more.

Giblet

Move to MVC and you can pretty much do the above using helpers.

mewso

Yes indeed Robdude you need to look at MVC with Razor. You'll never look back.

The biggest problem with asp.net webforms was what someone earlier touted as an advantage and thats the drag and drop stuff. I've seen some god awful stuff that we bought from third party companies where they used it along with that terrible asp.net ajax stuff. It's possibly why asp.net developers can have a bad name depending on where you look.

I've worked with asp.net for a long time and you almost certainly were always fighting against the built in stuff. Using repeaters instead of gridviews so as to output an html table that was standards compliant and accessible. Using class values instead of id values to access elements in script because .net was renaming them and so on. It never put me off but Microsoft always seemed to jump onto a band-wagon (standards, accessibility, unobtrusive scripting) but leave one foot hanging out of it.

Even now with asp.net mvc I still have to fight a bit with it's generated views that create forms with label/inputs grouped in divs, tables with no theads or id/header attributes, turn off their automatic "you must be using html5 by now" unobtrusive scripting crap and so on but their mvc framework is so customisable it's even less of a problem now.

What I love about .net and mvc now are things like the razor syntax and the open source tools like nhibernate, nunit, moq, structure map and so on. If you want to get involved in creating enterprise standard applications for the web then asp.net mvc is second to none imo. No offence to php but the correct comparison is .net v java surely?

conor.hogan.2

I could be wrong but PHP is still the most used server side language? By a long way too.

Giblet

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

I could be wrong but PHP is still the most used server side language? By a long way too.

That means absolutely **** all though.

Malice

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

I could be wrong but PHP is still the most used server side language? By a long way too.

According to this you'd be right.

stevenmu

I believe that's just public facing sites though. I'd suspect that in intranet and internal application use ASP.Net and Java would fair a lot better.

conor.hogan.2

I know it does not mean a lot, but it does mean PHP is heavily used which is important to the discussion.

stevenmu

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

I know it does not mean a lot, but it does mean PHP is heavily used which is important to the discussion.

Very true. I just wanted to make sure that it wasn't interpreted to mean ASP.Net isn't also heavily used

Malice

I'm quite surprised that the stats show that to be honest. Maybe it's down to interpretation. The likes of vBulletin, PHPBB and Wordpress are quite popular, probably more so than their .NET-based competitors. Taking those out might show a different picture.