Help me convince the ASP guy about PHP usage.

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Heavy
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Help me convince the ASP guy about PHP usage.

Post by Heavy »

Tomorrow morning, I have to be ready to meet a guy that has eight years of experience in programming using ONLY Microsoft software.

We are (me and him, with help of other slaves) about to develop a new platform for a kind of e-learning.

I want to use PHP for its great code flexibility and MySQL for its platform independency.

I do not want to use Microsoft server software because of their large license fees and virus attack risks.

I really appreciate PHP for the possibility of using multiple dollars and such, for example:

Code: Select all

$$Varname = "CustomVarName";
He claims that PHP is BAAD and I have to be convincing enough tomorrow so that we will not become slaves under the .NET philosophies and the license fees that follow.

He says MySQL starts ducking at 50 simultaneous connections and I don't agree with him, at least not for the 4.0+ versions.

I read the benchmark results from tests I have not participated in. They showed clearly that MySQL is really FAST, but is it fast in cooperation with PHP under Apache, compared to MS solutions?

I am asking you all of great arguments for using Linux - PHP - MySQL instead of Windows - IIS - ASP - MSSQL.

He wants to use VB.NET components for its speed, and I believe he is correct about VB.NET being fast since that server compiles the site instead of parsing server-side-scripts at every client access.

I believe that PHP-code can be more flexible than compiled VB.NET code. And as such, we can produce a new e-learning system quicker with fewer unnecessary coding hours. Am I correct, provided that I am a skilled PHP - and HTML-programmer???

I also prefer PHP for its PNG - JPG - PDF capabilities, things that ASP CANNOT do without third party applications charged for separately.

Now, What didn't I mention here that makes PHP a way better solution that MS counterparts.

Please, help me to be convincing tomorrow.
I wouldn't be happy to have to use M$-ruled systems for the whole next year.
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infolock
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Post by infolock »

asp and vb are both teh suq.

other then everything you have just said, the only other thing I could tell you is that php > vb/asp when it comes to security, ease of developement, and for hiding the source code that controls your web application. vb/asp does not, as any given joe could get in and grab your asp info, parse it, and get whatever necessary info he wants/needs about your internal user groups, whereas it's almost literally impossible to do that against a php site unless you are actually logged onto the web server through telnet/ftp and have access to the directory with the files...

Not a very big guru myself with php, but I have worked in vb, delphi, and C++, and out of all these languages, php has been the master of them all..
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Post by Coco »

also open source communities are alot free'er with their aid :)
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Heavy
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Post by Heavy »

infolock wrote:asp and vb are both teh suq.
I did not understand that...
infolock wrote: ... and for hiding the source code that controls your web application. vb/asp does not, as any given joe could get in and grab your asp info, parse it, and get whatever necessary info he wants/needs about your internal user groups...
It seemes your experience is as nice as mine. But I did not know it is easier to hack an ASP-driven site. Server side ASP-code is not visible by just getting an ASP-page from the IIS-web-server:80 right??
I don't know anything about PHP code beeing more invisible than ASP code. I thought that their code were equally "safe".

To clarify: We are talking about PHP usage on BOTH unix and Windows systems, compared to ASP usage on Windows 2000 Server.

My own security observations regarding Windows 2000 Server:
I think the access permissions to the file system NTFS are harder to set correctly (most hacker safe) than access permissions to for example ext2.

I'm trying to stay objective on this subject, but I have seen so many wonderful code snippets in PHP than WELL overcome equivalent ASP-code (VBScript) that I happen to like coding in PHP.

If you seriuosly claim that PHP is more invisible than VBScript for ASP even on a Windows 2000 Server system, then I really wonder how Microsoft could have missed something that important?

Excuse my English. I'm just a stupid Swede.
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wonderful english....really

Post by levi_501_dehaan »

alrighty then, btw you englist is spiffy..promise.

well first off, yes I would have to say that your safer using php.
besides that though, there are more resources for PHP, people who will help you and all that for FREE. can you say new car? cuz if you can then thats Great! well anyways,
You are right in assuming that PHP will be better, and free, the only thing is that you wont be able to pay microsoft tons of money for programs that have less functionality than gnu programs.
also you have to bring in the fact that even though microsoft has all those colorful interfaces and smooth lookin pictures (& the other way around) they still get their systems attacked as often as anyone else, heck even more so. but we dont need to go into microsofts security holes, cuz if we did we might get lost.
anyways, im not trying to insult microsoft.....i am.
well anyways, there is only one way to get your buddy off that microsoft stuff and onto a better drug, and that would be to show him examples, ie here is some code to load a database and get information from it in PHP and here is a program to do the same thing in asp, ect...
but what it all really comes down to is, whats your budget, and what physical/mental inadequacy is he trying to make up for?

and dont forget, microsoft is in league with the idiotic horde (macintosh, george bush, that dumb bully at school who makes you do his homework, ect), whose plan is to make everything so easy that we no longer have to think, and then they plan to take away everything that really matters, because we'll be too stupid to stop them. like C/C++, asm, coffee, caffinated drinks, command line, 7-ll hot dogs, swedish meatballs, perogies, kewl t-shirts that say stuff like r00t or ph34r my b33r, ect.. oh its happening already, but its our job, the smart peoples job to irradicate them..
-=Levi=-
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Post by Heavy »

Well, I'd believe that this very open minded really clever MS-devoted professional I am talking about would NOT be convinced by what you (levi_501_dehaan) just wrote. But it strengthens me alright!

He is not brainwashed with MS stuff, actually he just waits for me to say something that overcomes his experiences of MS. Unfortunately, he is well experienced and I am only poorly experienced. He has been doing these things for 8 years. I have for about 8 years too but only 1,5 years on Internet server-client systems. My prior experiences come completely out of ASM for DOS and Pascal (http://www.tmt.com) for Win32. This makes me a stable programmer alright (I believe I write efficient and good looking code), but I do not know everything about web-related programming and its risks and problems.

I might just go to the store buy a good book about Hackers and how they usually find their ways, and start building my linux machines from scratch instead of, like now, using out of the box distros.

Why? To get valuable knowledge - would be my answer.

I am not against the software that pours out of microsoft all the time. In my opinion, they are well designed (functionally) and often pretty free from bugs. But I really dislike them as a company. That Steve Ballmer jumps around like a blessed reverend when they make their annual reports. Why then? Because they make so much money. MORE THAN THEY DESERVE!

But hey! Some of the institutions of the Swedish government are migrating to open source solutions because they are tired of paying 10% of the budget to Microsoft. And there really are alternatives nowadays! Say OpenOffice for example.

Hurray!

On the other hand, Sweden is going down going down going down... Our politicians just vote on themselves and win every election, even though EVERYONE is talking about how bad things are. They are closing hospitals here! Can you believe it! And I have got to know that only 20% of the tax income goes to schools, police, fire protection, hospitals and health care. Uh! Come to Sweden if you like paying for undeserved wealth of incompetent people...

I now feel better armored against potential MS-attacks tomorrow. Thanks all. I'm going to bed. I will check for new posts on this topic when I wake up. So if anyone has more to give about PHP being better that ASP, PLEASE TELL ME!

G'nite!
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infolock
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Post by infolock »

hmm, lemme tell you what. give me a site that has anything to do with asp, and i'll post you their code that's inside their asp file that does their crunching.

mostly, when i say vb and asp are teh suq, heh, that's just kiddie jabberish. Translated to english, that would read "vb and asp are the suck", or, they suck, or, they are just downright horrid.

VB/ASP have more security issues then most coding languages out. Why? Because they are microsoft driven, which means 98% of your hackers are gonna focus on this fact, merely because it's Microsoft's. The reasoning behind this is kinda obvious. Microsoft has sucked in security since 1996, when novell was the leader in networking security. Well, at least until *knock.exe* was introduced lol...

dunno what else to say man. if you don't want people already having 15000 pages to reference to on how to use a vulnerability given by ANY ASP/VB driven win XX box, then don't use it, and stick with something more secure that is gonna be used in a Unix box such as php..

Every single os microshaft has brought out has been the major focus on attacks.

I wouldn't put ANY web server that I wanted to keep secure on the net using ANY windows software.

but that's just me...
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Post by volka »

I will keep this (very) short

.NET is a framework PHP only a language. It's more reasonable to compare .NET with (Sun)ONE and J2EE. So I will not try to state 'this is better, that one is worse'
  • some questions
  • What level of abstraction do you need? And what level of framework?
  • Will that be feasable in the future? What kind of extensions can be expected?
  • what changes in your infrastructure (hardware, tools, licenses, etc.) have to take place before development can begin?
  • what levels of knowledge/experience are available for each approach?
  • how does this affect the time-to-l(a)unch/market? (changes in infrastructure as well)
  • Where will your project be hosted and what will it cost? Does this pay for the project?
  • Does your decision fit the customers' needs and expectations?
  • Does your company want to comit itself to Microsoft/Sun/OpenSource/...?
p.s.: I can understand your college as MS knows well how to bind programmers to their platform (i.e. quite good development enviroment right from the start). And sometimes you have to stand back and say "ok, decision has been made. Wasn't mine but anyway; let's make the best out of it"
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Post by twigletmac »

And 'cos PHP is platform independent even if you get landed with a Microsoft server you can still install and run PHP and MySQL on it. Moving to Open Source can be a bit painful for some companies but you can do it in stages. The reason why Open Source is winning out at my place of work is because of cost, PHP and MySQL are free, the PHP search engine I'm adapting for our intranet was free, the e-mailing capability of PHP was free, the two pieces of forum software we use (phpBB and YabbSE) are free and updates to all of the above are free. There was also nothing that they wanted to do with ASP that PHP couldn't do.

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Post by Heavy »

# What level of abstraction do you need? And what level of framework?
Abstraction: I, my boss and my colleague (The), wish to make the system flexible and easy to customise and upgrade. We intend to sell this as a software solution to arbitrary customers with different needs. We will allow the customer to customise layout and database even after installation and when the system is up and running. That would require a great abstraction level in my opinion.
Also, we intend to create modules in the system that can be installed by adding a new subdirectory in the PHP code that contains and defines the module. Again, quite abstract.

Framework? ... I am too much of a newbie to understand what that is...
# Will that be feasable in the future? What kind of extensions can be expected?
Extenstions: We will implement frequent use of functions like creating PDF-documents, graphs, formulas and images using the system.
# what changes in your infrastructure (hardware, tools, licenses, etc.) have to take place before development can begin?
We intend to build this system for about 10 - 1000 simultaneous clients. For development purposes, we have the equipment required.
* Windows 2000 Server with access to MS SQL-server 2000 (we dislike the large license fees)
* Linux Mandrak 8.2 with continuously upgraded PHP and MySQL versions.
Thus, we believe we have the infrastructure for start of development right away.
# what levels of knowledge/experience are available for each approach?
My programming experiences cover some abstraction technique.
We are already running a distance studying platform bought one and a half years ago that is built using ASP. We find it poorly constructed and wish to create a new more flexible solution to suit our own needs (we do education in the area of industrial electrotechnics) and to sell the system to others.
So, we have some experience, some knowledge and a great devnetwork community at hand!
# how does this affect the time-to-l(a)unch/market?
It is all about having the time needed for development and testing I guess.
# Where will your project be hosted and what will it cost? Does this pay for the project?
We have our own 2 MBit/s static IP connection that we use for our own courses and students. Right now, talking money, what bothers us most is the fact that the cost of on MS SQL-server 2000 licens is equvivalent to paying for one programmer doing development for half a year !!
We are stable because of other incomes. We are not a strictly IT-profiled company, we also do education in classrooms.
# Does your decision fit the customers' needs and expectations?
As of today, we are ourselves demanding more functionality than what is offered in systems already avaliable on the market. We believe we have a good clue of what kind functions may be attractive to customers.
* Does your company want to comit itself to Microsoft/Sun/OpenSource/...?
Today we use Macintosh OS 8.6, 9,X and Windows 98, 2000 and Linux Mandrake. We are open minded so to say that we do not disregard any solution because of feelings or "computer-religion"...
Still, for Internet servers I would myself prefer using GNU solutions.

Thanks.
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Post by volka »

well, writing the answers to this board will do you no harm but the questions were meant to be asked in your meeting, comparing both approaches and maybe even others.
I thought it might be useful having answers for those in mind. ;)
For development purposes, we have the equipment required.
* Windows 2000 Server with access to MS SQL-server 2000 (we dislike the large license fees)
* Linux Mandrak 8.2 with continuously upgraded PHP and MySQL versions.
that's probably not all you will need. Calculate all costs including development enviroments, training, maintenance, etc. - hey, even the MSDN help system has it's price (and it became slow in the newest version, grrr)). licensing issues may play a big role
It is all about having the time needed for development and testing I guess.
what's that supposed to mean? Your boss has not the usual 'start-developing-now-sell-it-yesterday' attitude? ;)
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Post by Heavy »

volka wrote:well, writing the answers to this board will do you no harm but the questions were meant to be asked in your meeting, comparing both approaches and maybe even others.
:oops:
volka wrote:that's probably not all you will need. Calculate all costs including development enviroments, training, maintenance, etc. - hey, even the MSDN help system has it's price ... licensing issues may play a big role
As I said, we are already running, marketing, maintaining and providing support for a system built with ASP. So, when we (hopefully) change system to GNU - PHP, few other costs than those we already have will be added. Except for MS-licensing* of course, in the case of facing MS-systems instead of GNU-solutions.

* We are still beta testing the ASP-built system. And it seems like we are never getting out of beta testing since the garbage was malformed from the beginning... Thus, we have "customers" that use the system for free while we try to solve all the problems they discover. We are using MS-SQL today by accessing it externally. We are not paying for an MS-SQL server right now. Nor do we want to. They are SO expensive. And in the case of further sale, our customers probably find those license costs very high. I guess what the customer wants is that service or functionality, and cares less about exactly how it is done. That is more like MY headache.

We bought that ASP-system and have the full rights to continue development of that system on our own. Our improvements this far (after one year) have been so important that the company that sold the ASP-system to us have asked us to be their new development and support branch for that product. But still, we find it performing poorly and its functional design makes it a mill stone around my neck...

I really should not tell all you guys about this... God forgive me...
volka wrote:
It is all about having the time needed for development and testing I guess.
what's that supposed to mean? Your boss has not the usual 'start-developing-now-sell-it-yesterday' attitude? ;)
Kind of a fact really... He is a very stable and thoughtful man with 68 years of age.
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Post by sweahe »

I seriously doubt that MySQL is slower than MSSQL, see:
http://www.mysql.com/press/release_2002_11.html
..but anyway, you can use almost whatever database you want with PHP.
I can recommend using a database wrapper like ADODB, especially easy for an ASP-guy to learn I guess. =)
http://php.weblogs.com/ADOdb

Some more reasons to go the PHP way:
http://php.weblogs.com/php_asp_7_reasons

If speed is a main issue, use PHP Accelerator:
http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/

I cannot consider this MS guy as serious if he says PHP is BAAD, in that case he just don't know what he is talking about! Make him try it, show him all these great (free) sites that is full of articles and help! Today PHP is powerful and getting even more powerful every day!
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Post by Heavy »

Those links were interesting. The PHP Accelerator was indeed the most interesting.

On the evil day 11 september 2001, there was an enormous amount of visitors on a big news site in Sweden that this well experienced ASP guy has written the backbone for. There were 40 000 simultaneous ASP-sessions at a peak value, which was well over what the system was designed for. But still, it stood up through the test. I don't know what high end servers were used, but I guess they are awesome.

Are there any examples of PHP-MySQL sites performing well under heavy load?

Almost all examples I have seen are like:

"I ran 50 SELECT * FROM BLAH queries against the SQL-server and it took 1 or 2 or 3 seconds using that and that and that database..."

I want to read test or real life reviews about MSSQL vs MySQL where 10 000 users are stressing the system simultaneously.

Any admins for big sites, like this one (but on another subject :wink: ), that have such experience?
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Post by sweahe »

Well I found this:
http://zend.com/zend/cs/indy.php

Maybe you can contact the webmaster of that site (http://my.brickyard.com/500/) and here what they have to say about it?
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