PHP and ASP.NET

I've been spending more time recently with PHP development, because of a couple of products and technologies mentioned in earlier posts: CONTENTdm (which has a PHP API) and Archon (written in PHP). In contrast, all of the Northwest Digital Archives search interface development is written in VB.NET/ASP.NET. This includes the search/retrieval/presentation system; assessment and submission applications; and, an OAI-PMH data provider for the underlying TEXTML database. For this reason, I decided to more closely compare the PHP and ASP.NET technologies, based in part upon two Sean Hull editorials (1 | 2).

Two specific strengths of ASP.NET, both cited by Hull, are its multi-language support and the availability of excellent development environments. All of the NWDA development has been done in Visual Studio .NET 2003, which has proven satisfactory for managing this extremely complex project application. In contrast, I found the Dev-php IDE to be confusing to configure and more comparable to Web Matrix than either Visual Studio or the .NET 2.0 IDEs. Hull's analysis of the database options available using ASP.NET is incomplete, omitting the SQL Server .NET and OLE DB .NET data providers shipped to the ASP.NET 1.1 Framework. His follow-up article mentions .NET's improved Oracle support (Oracle Developer Tools for VS.NET).

A key advantage of PHP development is its real multi-platform support, a level that .NET has simply not reached. Efforts like Mono illustrate one of Microsoft's .NET goals, to ensure that Microsoft is protected in case another OS/processor platform combination gains market share at Wintel's expense. But clearly, the easy ability to port PHP applications to Windows, Linux, and Unix systems, as described by Hull, can't be matched with ASP.NET.

As Hull notes, the release of PHP5 should lead IT managers and developers to rethink the strengths and weaknesses of PHP and ASP.NET. He emphasizes the object oriented features available in .NET and now available in PHP5. I found when I was supporting the AKC Foundation site, that I was able to do rapid development in .NET using Google and Amazon Web Services and working with data related (RDBMS, RSS) services; I question whether I could match this development using PHP. Still, the strength of the open source movement and the PHP5 enhancements are leading me to take a closer look at PHP.