PHP Vs ASP.NET : Which One you Should Use for Web Development? Over the years, there has been a lot of open debate on whether ASP.NET or PHP should be the ideal platform for web development. Surely, the winner of these two promising development frameworks can be decided on the basis of their relative sets of pros & cons. In regard to usage of sever-side programming languages for website development, following graph can make the picture slightly clear.
However, one thing that's quite clear is that both these sever-side programming languages have rendered web development a much simpler task for developers. Let's take an overview of the effectiveness of ASP.NET & PHP based on different parameters Pricing: In terms of costs associated with development, PHP seems to be the clear winner as its available free of cost. ASP.NET application development would cost nominally due to the pricing related at different levels. ASP.NET being a Microsoft product would involve costs related to • Purchasing Windows • Windows Hosting • Integrated Development Environment
You may not have to pay extra while being at the beginners level; however, as you enter more professional stage, you would have to. Unlike ASP.NET, PHP runs on Linux web hosting and it can be used on Mac, Linux or Windows. Support: One of the most popular scripting languages, PHP is backed by a huge developer community that constantly contributes to PHP development, making updates from time to time. PHP developers community proves to be quite helpful, especially for beginners. On the ASP.NET forefront, though there may be several developer boards, the level as maintained by PHP community seems missing. Tools & Editors Availability: Rather than focusing on a full-fledged IDE, PHP developers prefer text editors like Notepad++ and VIM more. Though supported by a number of IDEs, ASP.NET is used mainly with the powerful, feature-enriched Microsoft Visual Studio that is available for a price but outscores all PHP editors/IDE. Scalability: In terms of scalability, both PHP and ASP.NET offer great value. You can consider examples of Facebook (built in PHP) and MySpace (built in ASP.NET), two of the most popular & traffic-drawing websites. The success of these websites itself speaks volumes about how scalable these development platforms are. It must also be mentioned here that the developers skills are by far responsible for carving a scalable application, whether its for PHP or ASP.NET. Performance: The successful interaction between the database, script and server is responsible for the a web application's performance. Most PHP web applications are based on LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) that is fully optimized for enhanced performance. So, the resulting applications are also high in terms of performance. In case of ASP.NET, MSSQL is often used as the database, though MySQL can also be used. In this category, PHP emerges as the winner.