Best webscripting languages?

What are some of the reasons to choose one webscripting language over another?

I've heard lots of debate that PHP is better and ASP, and from personal experience I lean heavily toward PHP and pretty much detest Microsoft's ASP.

Now all that would be good, but on a lot of big-name websites like hp.com, dell.com, and others I've looked at, I hardly see any PHP. Most of the time, I see the .asp on their URL's, or a regular .htm extension (which confuses the hell out of me... how do they manage massive sites with no scripting, or is something going on I don't see). Why do so many independent coders seem to use PHP and commercial sites use something else?

First off, large companies are a little apprehensive to use a product that isn't commercial and doesn't have a traditionally line of technical support. Their loss, I think PHP parses web pages a whole lot faster than an IIS server can dish out Awfully Slow Pages (ASP).

The sites you mentioned are also heavy Microsoft clients. Of course they use ASP. There are a large number of corps using PHP, such as Mitsubishi, Redhat, Der Spiegel, MP3-Lycos, Ericsson and NASA.

Apache webserver can be, and often is, configured to parse PHP pages with a filename extension of .html or .htm rather than .php. They may be using PHP and you don't even know it; a great security benefit of PHP!

This doesn't have anything to do with PHP, given that this is dependent on the configuration of your web server. You can do this with perl, mod_perl, jsp, or whatever language you feel like, and probably any webserver too (though I'm only speaking from my experience with apache).

Why do people use ASP instead of PHP... that's a tough question. Maybe PHP isn't taught at Universities.
Maybe ASP has better literary support.
Maybe people don't realise you can get PHP for Windows and IIS.
Maybe people are used to Visual Basic.
Maybe people have the Windows Os and think that ASP is more likely to integrate seamlessly than PHP.
Maybe it's because you can buy ASP modules more readily and they come with support.
Maybe they haven't heard of PHP.
Maybe one person in the company likes ASP, and that person is the boss.
Maybe people use SQLserver or Access and think ASP is the obvious partner.
Maybe the world has gone ASP mad.

Who knows why individual companies choose ASP over PHP. The thing you should be concerned about is why you should choose one, or both, of them (the current project I'm working on mixes and matches the two, so no winner there!). Don't worry that PHP is no good because big companies use ASP, big companies are very often MS orientated and therefore ASP is the only choice they'd consider.

There is no way to argue with is better, ASP, PHP, or perhaps Perl. Those are the debates that never end and only end up with bad endings. Why people use the other, is kinda like why people like different cars or like different cloths. They are both good, and actually I'd recomend you learn them both, if you really want to be into web programming.

Companies, safe really big companies, don't generally have their own web departments, but they hire web designer from another company. Sometimes the company says that they wish to use some exclusive technology; like MySQL, and PHP. But sometimes they tell us to make it in ASP or Perl. It depends a lot on what server their site will be running. If it is a unix system, then PHP or Perl will most likely be the right options.

As a last note, though often web sites use .php, or .asp prefix, it is not the law of universe. Check netscape or intel.com. Can you truly say what technology they are using just by looking at their sites? I can't...

Bet you that Intel uses asp though. The wintel alliance would suggest such a move. And netscape, server side javascript? Not asp though, logically.

Hi

Why choose one, use all of them!


Basic fact is that no one language, will do everything better than another language.....


The concept, of running a site on one language is rather lame to me. You should not design a back-end of a web site/service based on a language, but more so, on how safe and productive your service will be under that language! You will always find Perl does things better than PHP, for something's, and it goes the same way for PHP doing things better than Perl. It is like this no matter which type of language you use!

Each language has a place in the global infrastructure of the Internet today!


F!

Well,

I was quite happy with PHP and Perl until a colleague suggested trying Coldfusion. Only problem was I couldn't afford the megabucks Macromedia want for the full version so am now running (free) Coldfusion Express on my Linux box.

I found that it's a quite nice to develop in - it's not as low-level as PHP so you can be creative quickly - good for a newbie to build confidence. It has an interface to MySql as well, although the MySql parameters need a bit of tuning for best results. What did surprise me was that the database search/return times in CFE and PHP were comparable.

As the Express version is feature-limited I had to revert to writing a Perl CGI to handle one particular aspect of a registration system I wrote. Apart from that I was pleased with it. I bought a language guide quite early on that has helped a lot. Apparently anything you write in CFE can be run by the full version without modification - very helpful. The nicest feature for the developer is the optional debugging info which can be displayed at the end of each page - this can be set by IP address - great for developers!

So, in summary I'd use PHP for my WAP development or where you have to send out special headers, Perl for when I need to do something unusual, and Coldfusion if I need to get something up and showing very quickly.

Hope this helps!

I agree that using multiple languages does give you great freedom and a lot of options. But when it comes to building a web service or a simple site, it makes not much sense that you mix multiple languages on the same site -- unless you have a good reason for it. For instance, mixing ASP and PHP on the same site or mixing Perl and PHP sounds rather unnecessery. I have yet to meet a problem in web programming that could not be done with either ASP, PHP, or Perl alone. Rather you should think which tool to use for each project.

Or that's how I see it at least.