PHP vs J2EE vs ASP.Net

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raghavan20
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PHP vs J2EE vs ASP.Net

Post by raghavan20 »

I always was thinking whether I have put my efforts in the right technologies since the first day I started to work with PHP and other related technologies. We should be happy now-a-days to see PHP is more prevalent in small and medimum scale businesses.

With the emergence of PHP 5 and strong OO features incorporated stands as a competitor to other technologies. But guys, do you really think PHP is up the race? When do you think MySql will become a more acceptable enterprise - level database?

I would invite discussion/comparison of these technologies. what more features do you think should be incorporated to make PHP and MySql better? How long do you think this would take to happen?
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nielsene
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Post by nielsene »

Well I hope we can avoid a flamewar here...

I don't think MySQL will become a more acceptable enterprise DB until they address their long list of gotchas and they change their mindset. (Speed is everything and "if we don't understand it, it can't be good" -- their approach to Foreign Keys and ACID for a long time, they seem to be getting better these days)

However that doesn't mean that its crippling PHP's use in enterprise use. PHP can interoperate with basically any backend datastore -- PostGreSQL or Firebird for FOSS options or Oracle, MS SQL, etc for commercial options. I've built against PostGreSQL since day one with PHP and DBs. And there are existing enterprise sites using MySQL, so even though I wouldn't use it, its done.

Now comparing PHP to some of the other things you mentioned. Its never really a fair comparison. Are you comparing PHP, the language, to Java or C#, the language? Are you comparing PHP, the language, to the J2EE/.NET frameworks?

PHP is, in my opinion, just as capable a language, as the others. As a web-framework it does lack a few things (true application state would be nice). However PHP is more lightweight.... this both good and bad. There are times when I long for some of the advantages of Java, but I can't stand some of the other aspects of Java web development. The meta-data file proliferation is obscene and their infatuation with XML is very annoying.
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neophyte
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Post by neophyte »

Well I know very little about this topic. I only know :roll: PHP. What I like about it is that it doesn't force you into a framework. You can therefore make your own or adapt someone elses.

Here's a great article on the oracle site comparing PHP and ASP.NET

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/ar ... l_asp.html

Author likes PHP.

8)
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Post by Ree »

Well, I'd really like to find out more about this topic. If PHP is capable, why do others choose ASP .NET? There must be a reason for that. Also, you probably would never see a bank service online based on PHP... Does this tell anything? I'd really like to find out as many cons and pros as possible.
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nielsene
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Post by nielsene »

I don't know many that choose ASP.NET... typically only pure MS shops. J2EE, on the other hand, does have a lot of the market, probably mainly because the web e-commerce craze started while Java was the hot language. If the web had taken off a few years earlier it might have been a C++ based framework, etc.

I have seen some banking sites in PHP (some have hidden their extensions with various techniques, but didn't change the server string :O )

I've contemplated switching to J2EE mutliple times, if I didn't have a large legacy code base I probably would have switched. But not for any framework/feature reason -- because I want a refactoring capable editting environment, integreated with testing, etc. Eclipse with plugins offers that for Java, but nothing for PHP (either through PHP Eclipse or Zend Studio, etc).

PHP's biggest advantage in my mind over J2EE is its ease of entry. You can start simply and grow your skills in a much more incremental manor. J2EE tends to require a much steeper learning curve. I think PHP helpedi intoduce a lot of people to programming who might never had tried it otherwise.

I choose PHP because I had a lot of non-developers who wanted to help with my project and they felt scared by Java. However, they ended up not contributing in PHP either....
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neophyte
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Post by neophyte »

nielsene wrote: PHP's biggest advantage in my mind over J2EE is its ease of entry. You can start simply and grow your skills in a much more incremental manor. J2EE tends to require a much steeper learning curve. I think PHP helpedi intoduce a lot of people to programming who might never had tried it otherwise.
As a designer with college training in graphic arts, I agree with this statement completely. It's really easy to step into PHP and get really fast results with out a whole lot of training.
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