ASP vs PHP?

I will admit off the get go that I haven't researched this subject very much myself as of yet, but plan to. However, I decided the quickest and easiest way to get a "feel for things" would be to ask Flash Developers. So here is my question. Which is the prefered scripting language, .php or .asp?

From my understanding .php runs on servers using a Linux OS and .asp runs on servers running a Windows OS. If that is incorrect, please by all means correct me, as this is just what I have been told. Mostly I see .php being used with Flash, however from the brief scripts that I have seen of AS3 it appears to resemble VB/.Net or VBScript in alot of ways. Since I only have worked with AS1 and decided I wanted to teach myself either .php or .asp (eventually both), which would be the one to start with? I'm thinking .asp since AS3 resembles VB it will aid in the transition from AS1 to AS3. Thoughts.....

Mo

PHP can run on Windows, ASP can run on Linux (but is rare). AS3 more closely resembles JavaScript than VB.

I use PHP for no reason other than I dislike VB syntax. Your choice should really depend on your personal preferences of the syntax.

yasunobu13,

First off I thank you for your thoughts. Secondly, it didn't really seem to make sense PHP only running on Linux and that whole thing. Why would you make something so limited. But then I got to thinking maybe it's out to be proprietary or something. Thanks for clearing that up for me. As for AS, I noticed AS1 is almost identical to JavaScript which is nice! Very easy flip flopping between the 2. I myself don't really care for VB neither, to complicated of a syntax. I was leaning towards ASP since I've been reading a book on it, and it said that ASP pages can parse VBScript or JavaScript on the pages. I didn't know if PHP could and Java seems to be easy enough to learn. Anyhow, thanks again for the reply. It was very helpful.

Mo

PHP runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Win NT, Linux, Solaris, Unix, BSD etc

check out http://www.phpmac.com/articles.php?view=50 and decide for yourself which is more suitable

I personally prefer PHP, even though I did ASP development before getting into PHP. Much more easier to deploy, syntax is much more user-friendly (in fact very similar to actionscript), ASP syntax is very verbose and clunky in my opinion and for lots of functionality you need to buy third-party components etc

P.S php will be easier to learn than ASP in my opinion

PHP is a much easier transition from Actionscript since they have "similar" style syntaxes. ASP is a completely different beast from the VB side of things.

Also, in my opinion knowing only ASP is limiting in job availability. Most hosts out there have PHP. Only Microsoft servers have ASP. Even most Microsoft servers have both ASP and PHP. So generally PHP covers more ground.

There are also a lot more free syntax editors for PHP as well as documentation and help. :)

Yeah it can be confusing. Also add to the fact that ASP usually refers to classic ASP which only used Visual Basic. Since around 2003, Microsoft ditched that and rolled out the .NET (Dot.NET) framework and which includes ASP.NET. ASP.NET is much better than classic ASP, and can use either Visual Basic or C# languages. Because of classic ASP, there are/were many programmers programming in Visual Basic for ASP.NET, however I'd say there in the past couple years there has been a strong shift to C#, which is a much better language. Like others have said, Visual Basic is verbose. If you like ActionScript/JavaScript, you'll feel way more comfortable with C#.

At my work with work strictly with C# for ASP.NET development. We also use PHP. It just depends on the type of web project. PHP is a great language and isn't hard to learn, however if you're a major OOP guy with ActionScript, you may find C# OOP syntax more familiar to you. Bottom line you should consider what kind of hosting you need for yourself or for your clients. Shared web hosting for both is affordable (Windows and PHP), so you can develop for ASP.NET/Microsoft SQL or PHP/MySQL around the same price. If it's a dedicated server, a Linux/Unix server will by always way cheaper.

Wow, I'm glad to see so many thoughts/comments regarding my question. As I had mentioned, I was reading a book on ASP, which is old (pre .NET era). I do know some about .ASP as well as .PHP, however as I also mentioned, I was curious as to developers opinions. Which was easier to integrate? Which was less difficult to transistion to? You guys have answered all the questions that I can think of currently. In fact they've been answered quite throughly and for that I give my thanks. I guess about all that's left is for me to experiment with the different languages and see which makes more sense to me off the get go. Seeing as how I'm after a personal site, the client issue doesn't come into play. Thanks again to everybody.

Mo