Why is ASP more used in Ireland than PHP?

Ethan.Saaris

So, basically, is ASP more used in Ireland than PHP?

I'm not a native Irish person, but I've been working with lots of Irish clients and I had transfer jobs (from ASP to PHP, mostly WordPress-based).

Is PHP development growing?

I will be relocating to Ireland this fall, and I'm curious about the market there.

ChRoMe

Ethan.Saaris wrote: »

So, basically, why is ASP more used in Ireland than PHP?

What are you basing that statement on?

syklops

I used to work for a hosting company we had about 12 servers all PHP and one server was ASP. So yeah what are you basing that on?

Ethan.Saaris

I'm basing my statement on my past and my future clients, who had ASP sites.

I also noticed lots of big sites, either government or institutions, also use ASP.

Would you care to make a percentage? Like X% PHP and Y% ASP?

ChRoMe

Ethan.Saaris wrote: »

I'm basing my statement on my past and my future clients, who had ASP sites.

I also noticed lots of big sites, either government or institutions, also use ASP.

Would you care to make a percentage? Like X% PHP and Y% ASP?

So... just your anecdotal experience then....

I wouldn't guess, but the fastest way to get an idea is to do some searches on Irish job sites and compare the amount of hits back.

Ethan.Saaris

ChRoMe wrote: »

So... just your anecdotal experience then....

I wouldn't guess, but the fastest way to get an idea is to do some searches on Irish job sites and compare the amount of hits back.

Yes, my experience. I've been working with Irish clients for the past 6 years, so it's a pretty vast experience.

Thanks for your answer, though.

syklops

Going through my web history and filtering for .ie's, Im seeing more PHP than ASP. Granted I don't have your "vast experience" behind me.

Ethan.Saaris

syklops wrote: »

Going through my web history and filtering for .ie's, Im seeing more PHP than ASP. Granted I don't have your "vast experience" behind me.

It depends on what sites you are frequently visiting. I already specified what kind of sites fit in the description.

No need for attacks, I guess.

markpb

Ethan.Saaris wrote: »

I'm basing my statement on my past and my future clients, who had ASP sites. I also noticed lots of big sites, either government or institutions, also use ASP.

I've come across something similar - the profile of the company tells you a lot about whether they'll use PHP or ASP.net. Intranets, large companies or companies already doing their other development on .net almost all seem to be ASP.net.

syklops wrote: »

Granted I don't have your "vast experience" behind me.

Did the OP steal your lunch money in a previous life?

Ethan.Saaris

Indeed.

Also, some web design companies use almost 90% ASP.net, which is not the case in my country. I'm not trying to start a war, I was just trying to get some experienced opinions and percentage comparisons.

Thanks @markpb.

ChRoMe

Ethan.Saaris wrote: »

Yes, my experience. I've been working with Irish clients for the past 6 years, so it's a pretty vast experience.

Thanks for your answer, though.

A WHOLE six years? wow.

Ethan.Saaris

Oh, come on! Really? What's going on @ChRoMe?

syklops

markpb wrote: »

Did the OP steal your lunch money in a previous life?

No, I just didnt like his attitude in post #6.

It depends on what sites you are frequently visiting. I already specified what kind of sites fit in the description.

Maybe we got off on the wrong foot, but you're saying ASP is used more in Ireland than PHP. I said I looked at the sites I have visited in my history and PHP is winning and you are saying that its because of the sites I frequently visit. How is that different from you seeing alot of ASP jobs, because you are getting alot of ASP jobs?

Ethan.Saaris

@skylops, OK, we got off on the wrong foot. 6 years is a pretty decent time, I'm not showing off, I don't have an attitude at all. I'm new here, on this forum. Sorry for any wrong impressions.

You are right regarding ASP jobs, I was just making a comparison with my country and other countries I have clients from. So my question was based on a wrong assumption.

Graham

There are quite a few legacy sites written in ASP (particularly in the Public sector) and even more ASP.net. This is usually because MS products make up the bulk of their existing infrastructure so they stick with what they know.

I don't think it's accurate to say that ASP is used 'more in Ireland' even based on anecdotal evidence. A very quick search on Irishjobs brings back 92 results for ASP and 190 for PHP.

It's probably worth you going through some of the recent posts made by jmcc, he's one of the few(only) members of boards that can give an opinion based on facts rather than anecdotal evidence.

Ethan.Saaris

Thanks Graham. All of my jobs came through agencies, no jobs, that's why I didn't look there first.

Solair

I'd assume you're looking at sites e.g. government / state body ones that have probably all be designed by the same / similar agencies?

There's loads of PHP in Ireland though, I don't think you can generalise like that without conducting a proper survey first.

I'd suspect if there was any bias either way it's down to the size of the country and the relatively small number of web design outfits doing large corporate sites?

Ethan.Saaris

Correct. It was only a question based on some things I've noticed.

I suppose my question got answered.

H3llR4iser

As a matter of fact I noticed a similar situation when I was looking for my first job here in 2009, there seemed to be 1 PHP position every 5 ASP.NET ones; However I am not sure how indicative this is of the usage distribution of either platform.

My guess is that use of .NET, especially ASP, might be relatively higher in Ireland than some other countries because there are proportionally more large businesses as opposed to an economy where the bulk of the market is made by small companies often made by 2-3 individuals (e.g. Italy). These large companies might be more willing to invest in the .NET platform while for a smaller, fast moving internet orientated company, PHP makes much more sense.

stevenmu

In this case I think it's probably important to separate between intranet/application development and internet/web development, and probably also between internal development and external development.

ASP.Net is definitely used a lot for intranet/application development, in particular I've worked with internal development teams for a lot of big companies around Ireland. I don't think that's unique to Ireland though, I've also worked with internationally based development teams who work in the some of the big multinationals, and met lots of foreign developer/consultants working with ASP.net.

In my experience, ASP.Net is used by internal development teams much more than PHP. I specialise in Microsoft technologies so I'd rarely be called upon to work with PHP developers, but it would make sense for internal development teams to favour ASP.Net. Many companies, whose business isn't software development, but who have internal development teams, would have grown their teams using tools like Access, VBA, VB Script, VB6 etc, before evolving on to doing Classic ASP and finally on towards ASP.Net. ASP.Net also provides lots of advantages over PHP, Visual Studio's various templates and bits of functionality lend themselves very well towards business data driven applications, integrates well with other Microsoft products etc.

But then PHP seems to be extremely popular for developing public websites, I haven't looked up comparison tables in a while, but last time I checked it was clearly more popular than ASP.Net, though ASP.Net does retain a sizeable market share. I don't have a huge amount of experience in this sector, but AFAIK this is as true in Ireland as it is anywhere else.

Ethan.Saaris

@stevenmu, you are right. Some of the clients I've worked with had public facing websites based on intranet content management systems or customer relationship managers, built on ASP.net.

I don't have any experience with .net or ASP development but my tasks were to move entire sites from ASP.net to PHP and build administration panels. This was related either to change of hosting company or the desire to have a more flexible web application.

Graham

Ethan.Saaris wrote: »

my tasks were to move entire sites from ASP.net to PHP and build administration panels. This was related either to change of hosting company or the desire to have a more flexible web application.

Any organisation that went to the time, trouble and expense of migrating to PHP based solely on either of those reasons should be looking for a new IT manager.

I suspect (hope) there were more reasons at play which you may not have been aware of.

Ethan.Saaris

Maybe. There was an agency between me and the client, however the sites did not have any extra features, except the administration panels.

jgh_

Judging by the fact that everyone on here is always going on about Java, I assumed Java was the only programming language used for anything in Ireland.

jmcc

Graham wrote: »

It's probably worth you going through some of the recent posts made by jmcc, he's one of the few(only) members of boards that can give an opinion based on facts rather than anecdotal evidence.

I'll crunch some figures on it later tonight. The majority of the Irish web is on shared hosting and that hosting tends to be LAMP rather than Windows/ASP. The ease with which a site can be up and running using Wordpress/Joomla is a major factor. ASP (and Microsoft IIS) is used by larger companies but numerically Apache/PHP tends to dominate the low to mid market.

Regards...jmcc

smcelhinney

Arent we forgetting something fundamental here? Licensing & support costs.

Smaller companies migrate to PHP because of
a) free open source scripting language running on
b) free web server platform with
c) an abundance of community supported applications

as opposed to the licensing and support costs associated with IIS and ASP.NET including the exorbitant cost of some of their so-called "Visual" development software.

stevenmu

To counter some of those arguments

• Shared hosting generally costs the same or similar for Windows/IIS hosting unless you start adding stuff like SharePoint to it.
• Windows and .Net may not be open source, but that shouldn't impact on your average web developer. There may be ethical arguments in favour of open source, but it's hard to make practical business arguments in favour of it at this level unless you're doing something really specialised.
• I don't know much about support costs but I can't imagine them being too different when looked at solely based on platform.
• There's a ton of community support for .Net development. I'd happily pit the MSDN forums and 3rd party sites like Stack Exchange against anything you'll find for PHP
• The free versions of Visual Studio are extremely competent and are great development environments
• For medium to large companies the cost of MSDN subscriptions is pretty negligible, and provides a ton of value including the full versions of Visual Studio, other development tools and developer licenses for the server products etc. I'd imagine it's tax deductible too.
• Edit:Microsoft also have a load of programs (Bizspark, Dreamspark, Partner programs etc) that make it easy to get all their software either free or at a significantly reduced cost

Graham

smcelhinney wrote: »

Smaller companies migrate to PHP because......

I think it's probably safer to say most small companies start with PHP in the first place.

smcelhinney

Graham wrote: »

I think it's probably safer to say most small companies start with PHP in the first place.

True.

smcelhinney

stevenmu wrote: »

To counter some of those arguments

• Shared hosting generally costs the same or similar for Windows/IIS hosting unless you start adding stuff like SharePoint to it.
• Windows and .Net may not be open source, but that shouldn't impact on your average web developer. There may be ethical arguments in favour of open source, but it's hard to make practical business arguments in favour of it at this level unless you're doing something really specialised.
• I don't know much about support costs but I can't imagine them being too different when looked at solely based on platform.
• There's a ton of community support for .Net development. I'd happily pit the MSDN forums and 3rd party sites like Stack Exchange against anything you'll find for PHP
• The free versions of Visual Studio are extremely competent and are great development environments
• For medium to large companies the cost of MSDN subscriptions is pretty negligible, and provides a ton of value including the full versions of Visual Studio, other development tools and developer licenses for the server products etc. I'd imagine it's tax deductible too.
• Edit:Microsoft also have a load of programs (Bizspark, Dreamspark, Partner programs etc) that make it easy to get all their software either free or at a significantly reduced cost

Would you agree though, it's horses for courses (ooh, horses, topicallll!) I agree with you on some of your points, but Microsoft infrastructure and software are geared more towards a mid-level to corporate IT development strategy. The average joe-soap SME starting out, trying to get a web presence quickly, wont want to get wrapped up in the pitfalls of software licensing (multi-user access, single use, distributed etc).

With respect to support costs, was recently involved in an RFQ process where a company quoted €500 per day for IIS 7.0 support, a single resource. Having had pretty good exposure to all of the aforementioned technologies for the past 15 odd years, unless it's changed radically in the last 2-3 years, there's no escaping the fact that MS hardware and software is significantly more expensive to host and support, than open-source, community-supported.

Admittedly, the realised power of PHP/Ruby etc is not in the baseline code, it's in the frameworks that have emerged as a result of trying to emulate that which Microsoft HAS done well (which is MVC, particularly in C#) such as Zend, CakePHP, CodeIgniter etc.

I like these posts

Graham

smcelhinney wrote: »

was recently involved in an RFQ process where a company quoted €500 per day for IIS 7.0 support, a single resource.

and Linux admins work for free?

ChRoMe

Graham wrote: »

and Linux admins work for free?

I think the argument is that if its something like a little PHP site, you don't need an admin.

Graham

I just want to be sure we're comparing like with like.

I don't think there's a huge difference in Admin resources required between ASP/.net and PHP.

stevenmu

smcelhinney wrote: »

Would you agree though, it's horses for courses (ooh, horses, topicallll!) I agree with you on some of your points, but Microsoft infrastructure and software are geared more towards a mid-level to corporate IT development strategy. The average joe-soap SME starting out, trying to get a web presence quickly, wont want to get wrapped up in the pitfalls of software licensing (multi-user access, single use, distributed etc).

Very much so. I think the cost and complexity of licensing Microsoft software is often over-blown, but there are definitely going to be situations where it would be a critical factor. Your SME startup example is a good one, if they're doing self-hosting or VPS hosting, licensing could be a big cost for them, and could get in the way of them rolling out servers quickly to meet demand. There's ways of minimising the costs and hassles but it's easy to see a company/individual wanting to bypass them altogether.

With respect to support costs, was recently involved in an RFQ process where a company quoted €500 per day for IIS 7.0 support, a single resource. Having had pretty good exposure to all of the aforementioned technologies for the past 15 odd years, unless it's changed radically in the last 2-3 years, there's no escaping the fact that MS hardware and software is significantly more expensive to host and support, than open-source, community-supported.

Would an Apache support resource cost much less when compared like for like? (keeping in mind that both IIS and Apache support is more specialised than .Net/PHP development, solo contractors are typically cheaper than companies etc).

ChRoMe

Graham wrote: »

I don't think there's a huge difference in Admin resources required between ASP/.net and PHP.

Um.... yeah I think there is tbf.

smcelhinney

stevenmu wrote: »

Would an Apache support resource cost much less when compared like for like? (keeping in mind that both IIS and Apache support is more specialised than .Net/PHP development, solo contractors are typically cheaper than companies etc).

I see your point. In my experience, yes, they are significantly cheaper (approx 60% of the cost). Also, Linux admins probably dont have the luxury of being THAT specialist, for example, they should be able to support multiple flavours of Linux (RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, etc) on a variety of architectures, with vastly different configurations.

However, I may have shot myself in the foot there. The beauty of Windows (and by extension Server and IIS) based systems is that they tend to be quite specialised, meaning that someone can build up a very specific knowledgebase in a short period of time, and be very competent in it.

We're back to the original argument of "fit-for-purpose", which I'm glad we seem to agree on.

Graham

Again, I don't think we're comparing like-with-like. The fact that you may be able to get a Linux admin in for €300/day is not comparable with a company responding to an RFQ at €500/day.

The company has offices, infrastructure, equipment, employee costs, training costs etc etc etc etc etc. If you're doing a comparison, compare contract rates for both disciplines.

smcelhinney

In terms of salary, mid level Linux Admins (5-6yrs) seem to be earning 40-50k according to irishjobs.ie, Windows Server Engineers around 45-55k, so negligibly more. No contract rates there to see, Im just going on what I've seen in the past.

Or you could do what one company has done (on irishjobs.ie, not sure if I can link to it, so I wont!) and just lump the two of them together (windows admin, linux admin) and pay them 25k.. :rolleyes:

Ethan.Saaris

Well, PHP/MySQL is gaining ground everywhere, and even some public institution in some countries started moving towards open-source technologies.

I'm not a big fan of frameworks, such as CakePHP or CodeIgniter, but I agree it depends a lot on what the client needs.

I like these posts, too. I never used any Microsoft technologies such as .Net or IIS, but I have a quite strong understanding of they work, being a programmer.

Also, small companies start with PHP and they continue to use it, depending on their IT department or development agency.

awec

smcelhinney wrote: »

Arent we forgetting something fundamental here? Licensing & support costs.

Smaller companies migrate to PHP because of
a) free open source scripting language running on
b) free web server platform with
c) an abundance of community supported applications

as opposed to the licensing and support costs associated with IIS and ASP.NET including the exorbitant cost of some of their so-called "Visual" development software.

You can get the licenses through bizspark if you are a startup, I'm pretty sure that means you pay a vastly reduced fee. Or maybe you get it free, I can't remember.

Graham

I think bizspark gives start-ups a pile of stuff for free, licenses and free azure (MS Cloud) services.