ASP.NET VS PHP (Official Post)

After years and years of reading posts and looking at facts from both languages. I have decided to answer all the questions by using facts. Not my own opinion, but in facts,  no one cares what any one thinks, we live in commercial world and we need to look at this objectively. Some of these results will surprise people.  So, lets start.

Popularity:

Popularity of the keyword PHP: 8,720,000,000

Popularity of the keyword ASPX:  1,220,000,000

Let have a look at the statistics for the for both sites, as we can see PHP is getting around 40 Million of page views. ASP.NET website is getting 20 Million page views.

Right, this just explained popularity on the internet.

Now lets have a look at the reasons why ASP.NET is not as popular on the web and why PHP has more of the market share.

Languages History:

ASP.NET was launched in January 16 2002.

PHP was launched in June 8 1995

Just look at the numbers, php had ahead start in the market for the past 7 years of ASP.NET. PHP is the technology that has overtook  PERL.

Perl it self has been around for years, and reason why PHP has over turned the market was only because it had less overheads and used less memory and used more processing power. This made PHP a winner.

Industry Language uses:

ASP.NET is used with in large scale organisations such as totaljobs.com,  codeproject.com , dell.com , match.com , monster.com ,  nhs.com, and even londonstockexchange.com

PHP is used in organisations such as : yahoo.com, rackspace.com, imgaeshack.com, istockphoto.com, winamp.com and facebook.com

So we can clearly see that both languages are favoured by big boys. However, what does this actually tell us?

Putting Cards on the table:

Right, so we had a look at these facts, now, lets stop and think.

PHP has been running for  7 years more then ASP.NET,  PHP came to the market when internet was booming. It is the current market leader, lets face it.

However, is it a real market leader? Answere is no, here are the reasons why:

• In  these 13 years PHP didn’t come close to becoming pure Object Oriented Programming
• It has no clear structure of rules and regulations
• It has security issues
• It doesn’t really support business lawyers and logic layers
• It has no IDE

These are just few things that are negative, I can go on and on, however, I am not trying to say that ASP.NET is amazing neither.

Now lets look at ASP.NET, in the past 6 years ASP.NET came a long way. It has reached half the market share of the PHP just in 6 years. If you ask me that is preaty good going. What are the problems with ASP.NET?

• Doesn’t run on Linux (this is currently being worked on)

Lets look at the positive for PHP:

• It is free
• Runs on all Operating Systems
• Lots of code online that you can pick up and just work with
• Lots of support
• Huge community base
• It is based around C++ so it is easy to pick up if you have programmed already
• Lots of open source systems that are available for the download

These are just few things, I can go on and on, but I will stop, but lets face it. When you Google something on the web for php you will get answere for everything. This is because of 13 years of development and research, lots of solutions have been created and posted.

Lets have a look at the positive for ASP.NET

• Visual Studio
• Clear Structure
• Integrates with Microsoft Platform easily
• Multiple Language support so you can code in VB, C#,  J, C++, what ever you want really!
• .COM support and projects can be compiled with .DLL files.
• Clear code structure( when correctly implanted of course)
• Great Support
• Great Team Development Environment

Once again, I want to be fair so I will stop. I don’t want people to think that I am going for PHP or ASP.NET, I like both languages.

So, who is better or worst?

No one, both languages have found great place in the market and have closed that gap or have tried too. However, you need to ask this question differently.

Rephrase:  So when should use one and when should I use another?

Use PHP when:

• Your programmers know PHP and been working with it for years and they have library that they can use that will enhance the speed and productivity.
• You’re a large scale organisation and all of your files and fixes are in PHP
• You are starting to program and just want to learn some coding
• Your client wants his/her application in PHP
• You have Linux Servers

Use ASP.NET when:

• You have programmed in PHP for 2 years +
• You want enhanced productivity and cut down labour time
• You have Windows 2003 Servers
• You want to use SQL SERVER 2000 / 2005
• You want  detailed IDE (Visual Studio 2005)
• Your organisation uses ASP.NET in their company
• Your client wants you to use .NET technology

Conclusion:

One thing that I cant stand is when people start to argue about both languages. I hope this article will make people realise that there is no point arguing. Both languages are great.

Final facts:

ASP.NET is taking more and more share of the market, if ASP.NET can take over 20million of hits in 6 years. That means that they are doing something right.

ASP.NET is growing, and very quickly and rapidly. Of course there is growth in PHP and that is because development market is still growing, so both languages will be becoming even more popular then they currently are. However, remember, that most business run on Microsoft 2003 Servers, and company directors love SQL SERVER 2005 and they just generally love words like Clustered and .NET and Framework and Microsoft.

I am not going to go in to more detail, all I am going to say that is not language that makes language popular, It is the things that are based around it.

With .NET you get free things like:

Great programming environment like Visual Studio. Which includes add on’s like AJAX. You also get SQL EXPRESS 2005 for free. This just makes things so much easier it is unbelievable. There is also lots of Open Source software such as blogs, cms,  etc. 

With .PHP you get free things like:

Support, lots of open source applications. MySQL, PostgresSQL, Unfortunately there is no real good free IDE for PHP out there. You have to pay for them.

Final Conclusion:

When you look at your companies performance, and you look at how much you have spent on programming in PHP and how long it took to do things. You might see that it takes half the time in ASP.NET.

I am talking from my experience, and from experience from some of the large scale companies. They all say that they see massive improvement in productivity, and In the quality.

When it comes to programming for large scale corporations I would suggest to use ASP.NET because that is what it was built for.

When it comes to learning and programming for small enterprises then use PHP because it will be cheaper, only because PHP programmers seem to be cheaper then ASP.NET. (There is a massive shortage of .NET developers)

Written:

Zan Kavtaskin – Director of Prosper Web Solutions . Prosper Web Solutions is a website design agency based in Cheltenham .