Debate - .NET V. PHP: Top 6 Reasons to Use .NET

[Majglow]

Originally posted by mgkimsal

If 50 pages each include 5 external files, there are effectively 250 copies of those files compiled in memory. Yes, they're small, but it strikes me as inefficient. This understanding was/is based on several discussions with a hardcode ASP guy back in January - his name and email escape me, unfortunately, and I can't find the site where he mentioned this. I might be way offbase, but it explained a lot of performance issues I had with ASP stuff earlier, and I assume that ASP.NET treats things similarly (obviously someone here will hit me on the head if my assumption is wrong).

No, as far as I know ASP.NET, this is not true. (note, I know C# alot better than I know the ASP.NET technology, although I am pretty sure you can do the following).

You can compile classes into libraries and have the libraries (or assemblies as it's called in .NET terms I think) sit in the cache and then dynamically load the already pre compiled assemblies.

[mgkimsal]

The #1 money burner in big companies is time. It's a lot cheaper to throw money around and get something done faster. Also the sooner something gets done, the sooner money is made. The .NET framework allows really powerfull applications to be developed really fast.

I understand the time/money issue, but having worked in an ASP/MS shop for awhile, which espoused this line about MS being faster to develop with, I have to take exception.

Person X was trying to get server X to talk to server Y via HTTP, all MS/ASP (well, our end - the server Y was a perl system). Yes, he was a bit clueless and was writing his own COM thing in VB to do the HTTP talking. On and off for 3 weeks, testing/installing/debugging/etc. I installed PHP and had a prototype - with actual web forms showing various data stages - up in 3 hours.

*I* was reprimanded because I didn't fully tap out the MS solutions first, and they scrapped the code I'd put in. The client was being billed hourly. No one cared about the thing actually getting done for months - they could keep billing. Also, MS reps wouldn't be happy if they'd seen us using PHP on a relative high-profile client project.

Point is they were hardcore MS - very 'in bed' with MS. Using PHP, although it got the job done *faster* and *cheaper* than other people could using MS stuff didn't matter. Allegiance to the master, as it were, was more important than the best solution. Well, when 'best' is defined by how much MS tools are used, then by definition anything NOT MS is not the best solution, price/time/money be damned.

I'm always skeptical when I hear this line. I've no doubt that ASP.NET has nice features - I've seen some and think they're neat. Some are ahead of what we do, some are still behind, actually, just in terms of web stuff. But people that state that ASP.NET (or anything) is without a doubt the best at something in all (or even a majority) of instances seem to be young, ignorant, biased or all 3.

[voostind]

Okay, first some small points about OO (that's my field):

ezPublish is quite good, except for one thing. It's very slow. It should not have been made in PHP, as PHP doesn't handle complex OO applications very well

This statement (by Mattias) has the following 3 facts:
- ezPublish is designed with OO
- ezPublish is written in PHP
- ezPublish is very slow
Then the conclusion goes to:
- PHP doesn't handle OO very well

I'm sorry, but even though I've had lots of classes in logic (formal methods and such), I still can't see how you come to that conclusion.

Let me tell you something about OO: OO is a relatively new technique. As a result, very little software is written with it, and much of that software isn't done as well as could be. In my University, there are very few professors teaching OO. There are very few experts. Just look at Amazon at the various OO-books. The best ones are all by the same set of authors. It's a small field. Another thing: we already established some time ago that the PHP world has very few experienced programmers (and software designers). Now please combine this fact with the one about OO. What does that tell you? Very simple: most of the so-called OO-projects implemented in PHP are implemented the wrong way. And ezPublish could very well be one.

I just graduated in University on an object-oriented application framework, written in PHP. That framework proves all of you wrong. It's all OO, all Design Patterns, all in PHP, and it's very fast. Although one example can never prove a statement right ("ezPublish is slow, so PHP's OO sucks"), one example CAN prove a statement WRONG ("My framework is OO and it is fast, so PHP's OO doesn't suck all that hard."). That's logic.

And now I don't want to say anything more about it, because it really, really pisses me off.

But I do like to say something on another subject

From someone who uses a computer because he/she has to (about 90% of the computer users, probably) I can fully understand why they would use Microsoft software. It's the easiest. It has the most applications. It looks good. It plays games. Maybe it crashes now and then, but that has been the case since the first version, so we're used to that.

What I cannot understand is how someone who works professionally in the computer science business can support a corporation like Microsoft. Something is just very wrong with that company. I'm not saying I don't like their software, because often I do. But look at what they make you agree to before you can use their software! It's Big Brother all over. And it will get worse. Your personal and human rights are being taken away from you, and you simply agree to it. If you haven't read George Orwell, do so. It's not hard to imagine how things will be in the very near future if things go on like this. A single company has way too much power and influence, and nothing good will come of it.

I'm not a Linux user because I like it so much better than Windows. I'm a Linux user because I'm scared to death about the alternative.

Vincent

[Majglow]

There is also a way to "include" code from different files, but I don't remember how to do it with ASP.NET (I left my book at work). However, that problem with having 250 pages of code in the cache is an issue. But, what I posted in my previous thread solves that problem.

[Majglow]

Does anybody know more about how ASP.NET works compiling wise?

I posted further up that I believed that it sat in the cache as machine code thus making it as efficient and fast as any C++ compiled code (except all the extra .NET features that are compiled with it, such as garbage collection, but y'all know what I mean by fast... as in not interpreted).

Can anybody confirm my statement or provide some (non biased) benchmarks?

[Majglow]

In responce to mgkimsal's last post:

Well, you said yourself that the guy trying to get it to work was a bit clueless

2nd, I was talking about .NET which has A LOT more features than ASP 3. Honestly, I hated ASP. However, I think ASP.NET is a lot better done.

3rd, I'm also talking about bigger companies.

4th, I know PHP pretty well (been using it for 4 years) and from the little I know about ASP.NET I'm pretty sure I can do anything I could do with PHP better with ASP.NET (as far as big applications are concerned).

Granted, for small scale applications, both are the same and it doesn't make a difference. But I can give you many scenarios where ASP.NET can do a lot better than PHP.

Can you give me one scenario where PHP can do better? (Except for the cross platform and multiple server advantages that PHP has over ASP.NET which I acknoledge and I still use PHP for that reason... so I'm not saying PHP is all bad )

[Jeremy W.]

Originally posted by mgkimsal
If 50 pages each include 5 external files, there are effectively 250 copies of those files compiled in memory. Yes, they're small, but it strikes me as inefficient. This understanding was/is based on several discussions with a hardcode ASP guy back in January - his name and email escape me, unfortunately, and I can't find the site where he mentioned this. I might be way offbase, but it explained a lot of performance issues I had with ASP stuff earlier, and I assume that ASP.NET treats things similarly (obviously someone here will hit me on the head if my assumption is wrong).

This is basically how ASP does it. Because .NET is compiled, and you're doing runtime stuff and whatever, it allows you to (I may stand corrected) run it basically the same as you would DLL's: You use what you need. You don't include all 25MB of the DLL in your final application, you take what you need when you need it.

.NET works the same way. For instance, just as a for instance, we did a TimeSheet application back in January for our company here. Did it in Delphi, tied it into SQL Server. Fairly basic, didn't take more than a week to do. Size of the app? 10MB. It relied on a large variety of windows DLL's, custom DLL's, etc. Nothing complex, but this is fairly common practice in programming. It's relatively impossible to write a windows app that is less than 750K in size.

Until .NET. Now, we've redone the exact same Timesheet application, using the same tools, etc, except in .NET. Application development did take a little longer, because the guy doing it had never done app development before (another of the beauties of .NET... It wasn't threatening to him at all). Application size? 75K. 76,800 bytes.

It still runs though, how can this be? It's accessing available system resources.

So, how do you include one ASP.NET page into another? Why would you want to? Create a superclass with the functionality you need, inherit it dynamically, instantiate the object and away you go. None of this "include all the code just in case I need it" crap that we're used to in ASP and PHP. Use what you need, let the rest worry about itself.

For the record, to include an entire DLL or whatever you'd do 2 things in C#:

#include whateveritscalled;

And then you'd need to register the DLL with the application, a 3 click process (find the file, click ok).

So, yeah

[Jeremy W.]

As far as the economies of .NET, I'm not going to find the calculations I did or whatever, but at the end my challenge to people was the same: If you can prove to me that using Open Source technologies on Unix will not cost me more money, I'll write a proposal to the board of directors to switch. I stand by that, and as a result of the above statement, Harry has had to change his propaganda line from "Unix is cheaper" or whatever it was to something akin to "Unix is cheaper if you don't already have a vested interest in something else"... Duh.

[Majglow]

Originally posted by voostind
Okay, first some small points about OO (that's my field):
What I cannot understand is how someone who works professionally in the computer science business can support a corporation like Microsoft. Something is just very wrong with that company.

Because it's all about money. I mean, seriously. Why doesn't a company just code everything themselves? The OSes that their employe's computers will use, the databases that their company will use, their servers, everything... Why? because that's just dumb when you can buy it already made and save money.

That's why many companies pick MS products. They are a lot more complete than anything else and interface together alot better than anything else.

Now, please note, I AM NOT supporting MS or MS products. I am trying to be objective. Even though it seems like I am biased towards ASP.NET & Windows & MS. Right now I am coding a PHP application on a linux box Just because ASP.NET is not suited to my personal needs right now. But for huge companies it is.

What I am saying is that companies want $$, MS offers them the opportunity to make more $$ quicker, companies go with MS for the $$.

[M. Johansson]

Originally posted by voostind
I'm sorry, but even though I've had lots of classes in logic (formal methods and such), I still can't see how you come to that conclusion.

Actually, it was not logic, really. I have heard from people whom I consider(ed) knowledgable that OO in PHP is simply slow. That's why I said it.

I'm not a Linux user because I like it so much better than Windows. I'm a Linux user because I'm scared to death about the alternative.

Personally, I'm scared about nuclear war, venomous spiders, and talking to beautiful women. Using Windows doesn't seem all that scary, I guess.

Also, I'd love you if you could elaborate on my question in the other ASP.NET topic.
http://www.sitepointforums.com/showt...threadid=75177
edit - Dang it - it's in this thread, not the other. These should have been merged before they took off, really.

[Majglow]

Originally posted by Jeremy W.
As far as the economies of .NET, I'm not going to find the calculations I did or whatever, but at the end my challenge to people was the same: If you can prove to me that using Open Source technologies on Unix will not cost me more money, I'll write a proposal to the board of directors to switch. I stand by that, and as a result of the above statement, Harry has had to change his propaganda line from "Unix is cheaper" or whatever it was to something akin to "Unix is cheaper if you don't already have a vested interest in something else"... Duh.

I'm not saying that all companies that go for MS products would save money instead of using linux.

Ok, lets say there are thousands and thousands of people working at company X. Now, all of their computers have to be managed, there has to be security, what if an employee wants to use another computer on the other side of the world? What if the company X is set up so that there is a department with 10 people in it that have to setup ALL the computer before the employees can use them, because they are computer illiterate?

MS offers solutions to all this and a lot more... so it makes it easy to manage all the computers with win2k.

Now, what if we want a web application to be able to manage all these computers, security policies and all that online? I don't think PHP can be used too easily. Sure it can, but it would probably have to be extended...

Well, I dunno how Unix could handle all this. I am no Unix guru although I know it fairly well. I do know I would much rather install windows on 500 computers than Unix on 500 computers.

Ok, I'm off the PHP vs. ASP.NET topic now... but yeah.

[Majglow]

Originally posted by voostind
I just graduated in University on an object-oriented application framework, written in PHP. That framework proves all of you wrong. It's all OO, all Design Patterns, all in PHP, and it's very fast. Although one example can never prove a statement right ("ezPublish is slow, so PHP's OO sucks"), one example CAN prove a statement WRONG ("My framework is OO and it is fast, so PHP's OO doesn't suck all that hard."). That's logic.

I bet your framework could have been written in java or C# and been a LOT more efficient and a lot faster. (I'm not going to stand behind the java statement because I hardly know it, but I'll stand behind the C# OO being more efficient than the PHP OO).

Also, how can you claim that PHP's OO is robust compared to fully OO languages? PHP lacks some serious OO features. On top of it, the OO (in this version of PHP) was just "hacked" on. PHP was not designed around the OO features.

Seriously, although I respect your knowledge of OO, you can't say that PHP's OO is more powerfull than ASP.NET C#'s OO.

[Jeremy W.]

Don't worry, I'm not saying you said the above.

Okay, here's a very fresh example. We have a team of 5 developers. We do application, database, web development, etc, and use Crystal Reports extensively within the organisation (this is said to rule out the Linux alternatives).

We were looking for an application development environment. We needed 5 licenses. We looked at Delphi, since 2 of our developers loved it. Cost per license was 1700$US. That's 8500$, more than 10K CDN.

We looked at various C++ and Java tools, and prices were about the same, though not quite as bad.

We looked at Visual Studio. We're a charity. MS gaves us all 5 licenses, and threw in Visio, for 500$CDN.

MS isn't more expensive. Even without the discount though, the price of VS.NET is like 1200$ or whatever, far cheaper than any simple application development environment, and you get far more.

For us, specifically, going with MS solutions saved us 250K this calendar year, just in software. The software we develop with the tools we've bought will save us nearly 500K next year.

[Majglow]

Jeremy W.

Hmm... yeah.

Although, I bet in your case going MS (without the discount) would have been more expensive than Linux and Opens Source stuff...

Although it really depends on the application you were developing.

I'm saying that in some cases there are only two options. MS or developing EVERYTHING "in house". (MS is obviously the cheaper option).

[HarryF]

Oh dear oh dear. I'm sorry but whereever you've been coding PHP for 4 years, it was obviously in a dark room. Let's first make some basic points.

The #1 Programming langauge in the world (in terms of active developers etc.) is Java.

After Java comes Perl, C and C++.

What we're talking here is being used in business - fact not MS fantasy.

And one thing any MS developers out there need to understand is that Unix is the #1 business development platform in the world and if you ever think you'll be able to "show some of those Unix gurus a thing or two" with Visual Studio and some MS technology you need some serious help. You really need to meet a serious VI or EMacs developer and discover how sadly slow you are with Visual Studio.

Dealing with some of these points that have been rehashed again (I won't even debunk Majglow's first post about PHP: "OO sucks" yet again - perhaps you should read this thread) and are in the most part fiction;

- Speed of development, ease of working in teams. The less time it takes to make something, the less the company pays. Paying the coders is one of the biggest expenses in the long run.

With .NET, you can hire bad coders to come up with a half decent program for you, trusting MS tools to prevent their worst mistakes.

With good developers in either, speed of development is no different. I have my own collection of PHP classes and tools I've been building. Developing applications takes less time with every new one I make. For most ASP 3.0 coders the story is probably the same - they're no doubt unimpressed by the classes MS has written which they already have. If you're a PHP development shop, you'll develop PHP apps fast.

- Maintenance / Scalability. A well written application in C# can be updated and code can be reused a lot more easily than with PHP.

Rubbish. Write good PHP and exactly the same rules apply.

- Tools available. Ok, seriously. Try getting 20 coders working together on an application using PHP. Yeah, it can be done, but if you've used any of the tools MS has available for .NET you'd know how much easier it is.

Good one Course PHP has no tools available. That's why 9 developers from around the world weren't able to collaborate via CVS to build phpMyAdmin, a database management tool you won't find being used by every LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) hosting company in the world.

Any serious C++ developers please state your views on Visual C++.

Personally I can't stand developing with GUIs; they slow me down, they write code in a manner I don't like, they cloak what's really happening in jargon and buttons.

I'll get flamed for this but I bet I can prove it by testing some of you who've used Web Matrix or Visual Studio on your knowledge of SOAP and web services. Having developed experimental web services with PHP and integrated a Perl app on a remote server with a PHP front end using XML-RPC, I have a real good idea of how web services really work, and that's because I worked with real code and have total control over it. It's critical because there are some serious security issues with SOAP and web services which Microsoft is not making plain right now.

- Different languages can be used together really easily. I code using C++ mostly right now, although I am getting used to C# & ASP.NET. I really don't know how well PHP does this, I haven't searched this topic in depth, but I would be really surprised if it does it anywhere as near as the .NET framework does.

PHP is not a framework (I'll omit comments on Java and Python cos I'm getting bored of endless repetition) it's a programming language. Do you compare C++ with .NET? No. You compare C++ with C#. Making sense?

- Ok, this one is mostly for the internal applications that I work on, but all the microsofts technologies integrate really nicely. Mostly Windows2k's Active Directory and ASP.NET applications

The word "integration" is usually preceeded by the words "cross" and "platform".

In the real world, business critical applications don't run on Microsoft technology. Stangely enough, many big companies are still using IBMs mainframes to run their business (for example the almost entire airline industry and their reservation systems). They also have systems running on a variety of Unix version: HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux etc. and use a variety of databases: Oracle, DB2, Ingres, Sybase last (and most definately least) MS SQL server and middleware such as MQSeries and SAP.

Integration in these types of environments requires cross platform software for starters. So drop a group of .NET developers in this (real) environment and watch them drown.

Finally;

The .NET framework allows really powerful applications to be developed really fast.

That's just wonderful. You just need a customer who can run them.

[voostind]

Also, I'd love you if you could elaborate on my question in the other ASP.NET topic.

Didn't I do that already? If not, what question did you mean exactly? Or did you mean this one:

This brings up another question, though. You say that strongly typed languages makes sense for compiled languages (like .NET languages are). Now, Harry has been pimpin' PHP/Zend accelerator for quite some time, saying that ASP.NET isn't truly compiled, and that PHP still is faster/just as fast with the PHP/Zend accelerator. I now ask you - Is this really the case? It now seems even more unreasonable that a strongly-typed, fully OO language like C# which in the end (I think) is compiled to native code would not be faster than PHP/Zend Accelerated PHP.

It's in this thread, but I completely missed it. This thread is growing really fast!

Anyway, as far as I know (but I'm not certain), both ASP.NET and PHP aren't truly compiled, in the sense that they are converted to machine code. The .NET framework provides a virtual machine (like the Java Virtual Machine) that runs code compiled specifically for that machine (like Java Byte Code). There's nothing new or spectacular about .NET, nor was it when Sun came with the JVM. (For the so-maniest time: see Smalltalk!.) The PHP/Zend accelerator also provides a virtual machine, but a different one because the language it is for is so different. You'll probably have read somewhere that .NET is aimed at strongly typed imperative languages, and that supporting a loosely typed imperative language (PHP) or other kinds of languages (functional/logic) is difficult. The reason is that a virtual machine for such a language works a lot different. VM technology isn't good enough to support all possible languages at the same time (yet).

When comparing the speed PHP to ASP.NET, you should compare their virtual machines. And that is hard because they are so different. The one for PHP probably has more work to do (because of the type inferencing that can't be done at compile-time), but on the other hand it's specialized for the language PHP. The .NET virtual machine is much more generic and will therefore contain lots of additional indirections, making it slower. Both VM's have their pros and cons, and I can't really say which one is better (and faster). It depends, I think.

Vincent

[M. Johansson]

Originally posted by voostind
When comparing the speed PHP to ASP.NET, you should compare their virtual machines. And that is hard because they are so different. The one for PHP probably has more work to do (because of the type inferencing that can't be done at compile-time), but on the other hand it's specialized for the language PHP. The .NET virtual machine is much more generic and will therefore contain lots of additional indirections, making it slower. Both VM's have their pros and cons, and I can't really say which one is better (and faster). It depends, I think.

Hmmm... Isn't the .NET JIT compiler specialized for one language - MSIL? C#, C++, VB.NET or whatever is first compiled (converted?) by a separate compiler (converter?) into MSIL, which is the stuff that runs on the JIT compiler, producing bytecode (or whatever).

[voostind]

Hmmm... Isn't the .NET JIT compiler specialized for one language - MSIL? C#, C++, VB.NET or whatever is first compiled (converted?) into MSIL, which is the stuff that runs on the JIT compiler, producing bytecode (or whatever)

Yes, it is. But I knew you were going to say that...

Even though the VM supports just one language (MSIL), the VM still has to be more generic. That genericity is a follow-up from the fact that many languages are supported. You can specialize a lot during compilation, but not everything.

Vincent

[voostind]

I bet your framework could have been written in java or C# and been a LOT more efficient and a lot faster. (I'm not going to stand behind the java statement because I hardly know it, but I'll stand behind the C# OO being more efficient than the PHP OO).

I honestly don't know. The framework was developed with the language in mind, so it's design is very specific to PHP. If I wrote it in C#, it would be completely different. Don't draw your conclusions so fast. And you bet alot too, I think...

Also, how can you claim that PHP's OO is robust compared to fully OO languages?

I never said that. I said PHP's OO support is more than adequate. Which it is.

PHP lacks some serious OO features.

Incorrect. It lacks some MINOR OO features. Or what would you consider major?

On top of it, the OO (in this version of PHP) was just "hacked" on. PHP was not designed around the OO features.

Yes OO was 'hacked on'. But you're just repeating the same old stories again. I certainly agree that OO could be implemented a lot more efficient in PHP (and thankfully they're doing that now), but that doesn't mean it's horribly inefficient right now. Because it isn't.

you can't say that PHP's OO is more powerfull than ASP.NET C#'s OO.

That's right, I can't say that. So that's probably why I didn't...

Vincent

[mgkimsal]

We looked at Visual Studio. We're a charity. MS gaves us all 5 licenses, and threw in Visio, for 500$CDN.

MS isn't more expensive. Even without the discount though, the price of VS.NET is like 1200$ or whatever, far cheaper than any simple application development environment, and you get far more.

For us, specifically, going with MS solutions saved us 250K this calendar year, just in software. The software we develop with the tools we've bought will save us nearly 500K next year.

That's great. It'd be great if they did that for many people. Oh yeah, they do, which basically either inflates the price for other people or makes a mockery of 'retail pricing' altogether.

We're obviously getting away a bit from the issue of language, but MS can afford to do that kind of stuff because of years of illegal practices in other areas. This isn't a 'MS SUCKS' rant, but they illegally abused their monopoly status, and have financially benefitted from that. They can now afford to undercut everyone else in the industry as much as they want, in order to gain even more market/mindshare in new arenas. You still have to buy Windows to run that those apps on, but it's pretty much impossible to ever come up with numbers that any one person will pay for MS products because it varies.

We've did a presentation comparing costs for various options to a particular client. The only thing we have to go on is MS 'retail pricing' published on their pages. They scoffed and said the numbers should be cheaper because they can get stuff discounted from MS or another supplier. We weren't trying to sell MS or anything else, just saying 'hey, between these various options, here's the anticipated costs, based on published numbers from each vendor's site'.

You 'get far more' because the money financing it has come from illegal means. Not saying everyone else is perfect at all, but it becomes easier to undercut competition when you don't worry about adhering to the law.

[Jeremy W.]

Um, a lot of companies give charity discounts, MS just has a constant commitment to it

[Mincer]

Originally posted by Jeremy W.
.NET works the same way. For instance, just as a for instance, we did a TimeSheet application back in January for our company here. Did it in Delphi, tied it into SQL Server. Fairly basic, didn't take more than a week to do. Size of the app? 10MB. It relied on a large variety of windows DLL's, custom DLL's, etc. Nothing complex, but this is fairly common practice in programming. It's relatively impossible to write a windows app that is less than 750K in size.

Until .NET. Now, we've redone the exact same Timesheet application, using the same tools, etc, except in .NET. Application development did take a little longer, because the guy doing it had never done app development before (another of the beauties of .NET... It wasn't threatening to him at all). Application size? 75K. 76,800 bytes.

But surely this example shows nothing relative to the php vs .net? I've said it about 10 times (not that anyone seems to notice) that we can't compare application development for standalone deployable binary executables with server-side web development. It's simply not comparing the same thing!

I've just deployed an application to well over 1000 users and all it took was telling them where to point their web browser (whatever version they have as long as it's a v$ or above). If I'd tried to get budget for .net training and then said that I couldn't deploy my app unless we upgraded every single PC in Europe with the latest .net framework librabies (to make sure we caught any pc that the app might be asked to run on). I'd have been laughed at.

I'm never going to try and advocate that a Delphi application developer start using php to develop his Win32 applications, so where on earth all these things start entering the comparison from eludes me entirely.

.NET - Great!
PHP - Great!

Whether this applies to you or not depends on what you're doing, and what you already have.

[HarryF]

Two asides:

1. Can we make Vincent policeman of all future PHP / ASP threads?

2. Sitepoints new discussion articles seem to be working

[Hartmann]

Let me throw some things out here....

The .NET platform is a very inventive and useful framework and development platform. Microsoft has done a great job improving on their previous technologies, I will give them that. I am not sure that it would be easier to implement or develop for though.... The J2EE architecture is the same way. These things sometimes require expensive development tools.

For a large corporation who needs the development environment for all of their developers buying a PHP editor from someone like Maguma or Zend would be pocket change. The testing servers would be the same way...

I think that both technologies are going to continue to revolutionize the internet and the way things are developed. I think the bashing or trying to disprove things about either language should be stopped. I am not trying to bash .NET because I have yet to use it. I think the ideas behind it are good and it looks like a stable architecture.

With that being said, will these Language vs. Langauge threads ever stop??

[Majglow]

Originally posted by HarryF [B]
The #1 Programming langauge in the world (in terms of active developers etc.) is Java.

After Java comes Perl, C and C++.[B]

Ok, sure, I don't see how this goes against anything I said.

Originally posted by HarryF
You really need to meet a serious VI or EMacs developer and discover how sadly slow you are with Visual Studio.

Are you one of them?

Originally posted by HarryF
Dealing with some of these points that have been rehashed again (I won't even debunk Majglow's first post about PHP: "OO sucks" yet again - perhaps you should read this thread) and are in the most part fiction;

Alright, I don't claim I am all knowing, but I would like to learn. For some reason I am under the impression that their OO isn't as good as say C#'s (or C++'s cauze that's my main language). But, please, if you can show me that OO is better done with PHP than C# I would gladly listen and learn.

Originally posted by HarryF
With good developers in either, speed of development is no different. I have my own collection of PHP classes and tools I've been building. Developing applications takes less time with every new one I make.

Are you saying all PHP coders are good? And if you reread what I posted, I didn't say ASP.NET made all coding faster. I said in some cases it did. For example, you already are using MS's Active Directory and you need a web application that somehow either manipulates users or computers. I bet it's a lot easier in ASP.NET than with PHP... unless PHP has functionality to manage the Active Directory that I don't know about.

But, if you reread my posts, you will notice that I did not say that ASP.NET made things faster and easier in ALL cases. If for some reason I did (I don't feel like going back and reading everything I posted) then I didn't mean to and I'll correct myself now.

Originally posted by HarryF
Good one Course PHP has no tools available. That's why 9 developers from around the world weren't able to collaborate via CVS to build phpMyAdmin, a database management tool you won't find being used by every LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) hosting company in the world.

Again, I didn't say it wasn't possible, I said it was easier. But, I suppose it comes down to personal preference. I prefer GUI's and they are not slower once all the keyboard shortcuts are memorized.

I know somebody who wrote a complete 3D engine in assembly. So, I guess anybody who uses C / C++ or anything else to write a 3D engine is an ignorant fool because they didn't write it in assembly.

Originally posted by HarryF
Any serious C++ developers please state your views on Visual C++.

I personally quite like it, and once all the keyboard shortcuts are memorized, I don't see how it is slower, I can do almost anything in 3 keyboard strokes, at most. Maybe a couple of additional tab's too. As I said before, it all comes down to personal preference. If you think GUI's are slower, it's probably because you didn't spend as much time as I did with them, same reason why I would think the other way around is slower.

Originally posted by HarryF
It's critical because there are some serious security issues with SOAP and web services which Microsoft is not making plain right now.

I think it would quite usefull if you exposed them for everybody.

Originally posted by HarryF
PHP is not a framework (I'll omit comments on Java and Python cos I'm getting bored of endless repetition) it's a programming language. Do you compare C++ with .NET? No. You compare C++ with C#. Making sense?

I think I compared PHP with ASP.NET w/ C#. I just stated that with the .NET framework many languages could interface together. Sure, PHP is not a framework, I know. What framework am I supposed to use with PHP to achieve this? Maybe there is one that I don't know of. Does anybody know?

Originally posted by HarryF
In the real world, business critical applications don't run on Microsoft technology.

That's funny, I don't know what world you live in, but in the world I live in MS is one of the biggest companies in the world. How do they make their money if nobody uses their products? Sell drugs. Ok, Ok, I know you were refering to the business world by "real world" but I can name some gigantic businesses that rely 99.9% on MS products. Intel is one if you must know... but I'm not going to go on.

I don't know much about the % of the market. All I know is how I earn my living. But I would be interested if you could back up all your claims about microsoft coming in last with something. It would make me smile (because even though I do not appear like it, I am not a MS freak).

Originally posted by HarryF
Integration in these types of environments requires cross platform software for starters.

That isn't true in all cases, probably not even most.

Originally posted by HarryF
That's just wonderful. You just need a customer who can run them.

Don't worry about that, I'm doing fine


Now, for my last comment. I would like people not to get me wrong. In ALL of my posts I did not say that ASP.NET was an end all solution. I was just trying to say that it is it's little niche where it solves problems quite well. So do most other languages, frameworks, whatever...

So, please try not to take what I say the wrong way