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Should I do My WebApps In PHP?

Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 4:06 am
by abrogard
I'm floundering around trying to find my way through a plethora of languages: Perl, Python,PHP, html, asp, C#, CSS and whatever....

And all I want to do is find a way to write simple little web apps quickly with a minimum of fuss.

So I took to Visual Studio and thought I'd write in C# as it seemed all the go.... Visual IDE, powerful popular language, etc., etc...

But then I ran into hassles publishing the app to my website. Asp compatibilities. Then web.config file problems. And then I ran into hassles locating labels and stuff on the page and was directed to learn CSS for that.

And I suddenly thought of something very simple I wrote years ago - a 'feedback page' - in PHP and how easy that was and I suddenly thought - 'Maybe this is all crap. Maybe all I need is PHP'

So I've come here to ask. Is PHP all you really need?

regards,

ab :)

Re: Should I do My WebApps In PHP?

Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 5:24 am
by krishnasrikanth
Yes. PHP is very simple. You can do quick wonders in it. By the way, what kind of webapp that you are thinking of? services? mashups?

Re: Should I do My WebApps In PHP?

Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 5:35 am
by Eran
You still need to know HTML, CSS and probably Javascript to build a web application. There's no getting around that

Re: Should I do My WebApps In PHP?

Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 7:11 am
by abrogard
Still need to know html,css and javascript? I can believe it but I'm amazed.

There's been so much progress made in programming languages in the last ten years (since I dropped out and OOPs and GUI's came in) but to knock up a simple web page you still need three different languages!!

I'm sitting there with Visual Studio in front of me, dragging and dropping powerful tools like the fileuploader and feeling like god and then suddenly find I can't control where anything appears on the page! and suddenly feel like the most powerless of all god's creatures :(

My apps will be simple little tools, that's all. I've started on two of them. One's in javascript on greenpepper.org and the other - the visual studio, asp.net and c# thing, is at brassrazoo.com/Default.aspx and that one is barely begun - just at what we might call 'proof of concept' stage if that phrase isn't too lofty for my high-school level type project.

That's the one where I thought I'd be right into really slick good stuff and came a cropper quick time with server incompatibilities and to my amazement found myself staring at a gui ide that wouldn't allow me to rigidly control object locations....

That's when I began to think jeez, what's all this complication for? I might just as well be writing in dreamweaver and php which seems to be a kinda downmarket, more casual, colloquial toolset. Somehow not up-to-the-mark quite as much as MS's big time Visual Studio and the mighty totally nerdy and arcane C#. But what did that mighty, nerdy, arcane, powerful stuff do for me? Just left me stuck with a page with apparently randomly floating labels on it....

Might as well go 'downmarket and casual' I thought to myself...

So I thought I'd ask you guys.

I did google around a bit and I found quite a number of forum threads discussing this very question: PHP or ASP.NET and I got a fair sort of basic understanding of the differences and the merits of each.

But the most recent of the threads, the discussions, that I saw was 2008 and that's two years ago now, much could have changed. the whole computing world can change in two years, we've seen that.

So it seemed that Asp.net was the way to go if you looked like writing large or 'extensive' (i.e. extending through a large range of computing, programming, techniques, so to speak) progs, or trying to sell yourself to a large corporate employer.

But otherwise php was quicker/slicker and virtually open source (which I am devoted to).

So if that's true I guess I'm just kinda wondering what the situation is like these days, still the same?

Re: Should I do My WebApps In PHP?

Posted: Thu May 27, 2010 9:58 am
by onion2k
Write your website in the language you know best, or the language that you want to get to know best. That's the only criteria (at the beginning).

But understand that you'll need to know, or pay someone else to write, the following: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL and either ASP or PHP (or Ruby, Erlang, TCL, Perl, etc). That's 5 things for a relatively basic website. If you get into more complicated things you'll start needing other technologies on top of those.

Building a website isn't simple.