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ASP.NET vs PHP - which one to choose?

Both these platforms for developing dynamic web pages are nowadays very popular and widely used. Both have its supporters and opponents and it can be a hard task which one to choose. In this tutorial I'll present you some differences and similarities between these two so you can decide which one is better for you. Note that ASP.NET and PHP are different so for some projects it's better to use one of these two and for other projects the other one.

ASP.NET is a framework developed by Microsoft for building web pages and web applications in .NET languages. It was firstly released in 2002 and current version is 4.0. It has extensions such as ASP.NET AJAX (for client-side programming) or ASP.NET MVC (for creating applications in model-view-controller) model. If you want to learn more about ASP.NET MVC check out our previous tutorials.

PHP is a scripting language now developed by PHP Group that was initially released in 1995 and the current version is 5.4. One of the biggest advantage of PHP is that it's completely free to use and it's open source. What's more it is cross-platform software so it can be developed in any operating system.

Performance

Generally ASP.NET is considered to be faster than PHP but there are some resources in Internet that claim otherwise. ASP.NET is compiled language while PHP is interpreted language. Basically performance of your web application depends on the good and well thought design and implementation so unless you have some specific needs performance shouldn't be a deciding factor for choosing a platform for your project.

Security

In this case it again depends mainly on programmers. In both languages you can write good application that will be resistant for majority of attacks. I said majority because you can never be sure that your application is perfectly immune for any type of attack. Unfortunately in both these platforms you can create also an application that could be easily attacked by using very simple techniques such as SQL injection. Remember to always follow security rules the most important one being never trust the user (learn how to deal with unexpected inputs).

Costs

In this section the winner is of course PHP, it's completely free and it's open source. Generally most of hosting services are cheaper for PHP than for ASP.NET (there are more hosting providers for PHP). Using ASP.NET is quite expensive but remember that for the price you get many features like Visual Studio or MS SQL Server. You might also consider using free open source IDEs for ASP.NET like Mono. Note that even if you're using PHP that's free there might be a need to buy some commercial controls or libraries so you have to think it thoroughly and take all aspects into consideration.

Ease of development

ASP.NET operates on higher level of abstraction, so your code will be probably better. Your programmers should be more productive using .NET language and it will be easier to create reusable code that in the future can save you a lot of time and money. PHP is also less oriented for OOP than .NET.

Maturity and future prospects

Both ASP.NET as well as PHP are mature projects with lots of users all over the world. Each one is well documented and you can find many articles, tutorials and courses in the Internet so both are relatively easy to learn (thanks to the number and quality of materials that can be found). As for the future prospects it's highly unlikely that these platforms would disappear anytime soon.

Closing remarks

Choosing the right platform for your project is note an easy task because you have to take a  lot of things into consideration. Remember that your choice should depend on the kind of project that you will be working on. Note that choosing a right programming platform might be critical for your project so take your time and think it thoroughly. If you don't know these two platforms it's a good idea to learn some basics using tutorials that can be found in Internet and than decide which one to choose.

This tutorial was brought to you by NetroStar, a Miami-based global web design company.