ASP is not really a language in itself, it's an acronym for Active
Server Pages, the actual language used to program ASP with is Visual
Basic Script or JScript. The biggest drawback of ASP is that
it's a proprietary system that is natively used only on Microsoft
Internet Information Server (IIS). This limits it's availability to
Win32 based servers. There are a couple of projects in the works
that allows ASP to run in other environments and webservers:
InstantASP
from Halcyon (commercial),
Chili!Soft ASP from
Chili!Soft (commercial).
ASP is said to be a slower and more cumbersome language than PHP, less
stable as well. Some of the pros of ASP is that since it primarily
uses VBScript it's relatively easy to pick up the language if you're
already know how to program in Visual Basic. ASP support is also
enabled by default in the IIS server making it easy to get up and
running. The components built in ASP are really limited, so if you
need to use "advanced" features like interacting with FTP servers,
you need to buy additional components.
2. Is there an ASP to PHP converter?
PHP is commonly said to be faster and more efficient for complex
programming tasks and trying out new ideas. PHP is generally referred
to as more stable and less resource intensive as well. Cold Fusion
has better error handling, database abstraction and date parsing
although database abstraction is addressed in PHP 4. Another
thing that is listed as one of Cold Fusion's strengths is its excellent
search engine, but it has been mentioned that a search engine is not
something that should be included in a web scripting language. PHP
runs on almost every platform there is; Cold Fusion is only available
on Win32, Solaris, Linux and HP/UX. Cold Fusion has a good IDE
and is generally easier to get started with, whereas PHP initially
requires more programming knowledge. Cold Fusion is designed with
non-programmers in mind, while PHP is focused on programmers.
A great summary by Michael J Sheldon on this topic has
been posted to the PHP mailing list. A copy can be found
at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general&m=95602167412542&w=1.
The biggest advantage of PHP over Perl is that PHP was designed for
scripting for the web where Perl was designed to do a lot more and can
because of this get very complicated. The flexibility / complexity
of Perl makes it easier to write code that another author / coder
has a hard time reading. PHP has a less confusing and stricter format
without losing flexibility. PHP is easier to integrate into existing
HTML than Perl. PHP has pretty much all the 'good' functionality of
Perl: constructs, syntax and so on, without making it as complicated
as Perl can be. Perl is a very tried and true language, it's been
around since the late eighties, but PHP is maturing very quickly.
