Hi,

I used to do PHP a lot 4-5 years ago with PHP3 and then at the begenning of PHP4. I then switched to ASP.NET 1.1 and 2 and I just love .NET.

A co-worker and I had a discussion about using PHP for our web development. We argued and a few days later, after I did some reading.. I finally came to this thinking:

ASP.NET which is part of the .NET platform is best suited for big web application that require more than a DB. As the .NET platform provide easy access to Web Service, Windows Development and with .NET 3, it provides workflow foundation among other really nice thing. Sure, servers cost more. But once you're confortable with something in the .NET framework, it is relatively easy to move on to another part. It is consistent across the framework.

PHP is certainly best suited for small web projects. For me small doesn't mean a small web site. I understand some really big website are done with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). What I mean by small is that it doesn't require a lot of "extra" stuff like Web Service, Windows Service / Application, workflow support and all that stuff. What I also told, it is that in the open source community, stuff is free, server are cheaper and that's a plus! Something I dislike (a little bit) is that when you want to start using an open source framework, you need to learn it. Then, you need another framework and since it hasn't been written by the same people, it's not that consistent.

Anyways... since I've been involved in .NET projects for the past few years, and I would like to get back to PHP, considering I have a great understanding of the object oriented programmation, what books would you suggest me for reading?

I haven't seen much of the PHP5. I used to work with stuff I developped over the year so I could jump start a project quickly!

I want to know your architecture, do you use DB.php from PEAR? how are you setup? How do you structure your project? How do you do globalization (multi-language support)? What do you use for logging?

Is there other PEAR (or other) package I should know?

That's a lot of questions, feel free to answer to any of them and/or ask me to precise some of them!

Thanks for you time!