Hi everyone,

At my job, www.MusiciansAtlas.com we have two web applications: the front-end "public site," which is where the above links to, and a back-end subscriber based Directory one.

The back-end site recently was programmed into ASP.NET - which makes sense because it's an application.

The front-end is currently written in ASP. My bosses want to redesign the front-end. I'm for that but I suggested they go into PHP. The reasoning is that it's open-sourced, powerful, easy to use and there's a lot of programmers (though I would be programming the site).

BTW, we use JavaScript, XHTML and CSS - I eventually want to go into AJAX.

The woman who did the back-end application wants to bring it into ASP.NET. I'm not crazy about the idea because I think ASP.NET is an expensive technology, the learning curve is high plus my bosses change the pages CONSTANTLY. They also like bells and whistles like FLASH, rss feeds, etc. I'm not sure how it will handle JavaScript (if at all) and AJAX.

Also, my job is prime for a CMS system - which I started programming in PHP and thought about patching in with Drupal.

I don't know ASP.NET and personally, am not crazy to learn it. It reminds me of the old days with the clunky Microsoft Desktop development application model. This is why I became a web programmer. Also, I'm leary of Microsoft because isn't this the 3rd time they reprogrammed the interface? I'm just afraid that it's not flexible design wise for constant changes to borders, page layouts, etc.

What they want on their home pages are rss fields and sample listings from the database (which I can call up in PHP).

For example, could ASP.NET have handled this page which I created entirely from a Database using Javascript & DHTML?

http://www.musiciansatlas.com/pages/jukebox2007.asp


But I have an open mind and would like to open up discussions about going PHP or ASP.NET. What are the pros & cons of each.

I'm going to post this on the PHP side and the .NET forum.

I really need guidance because I don't want to steer my bosses wrong. Plus, if they do venture into ASP.NET, I may be looking for work elsewhere as a front-end web programmer with PHP.

Donna

Originally Posted by DonnaZ

I don't know ASP.NET and personally, am not crazy to learn it. It reminds me of the old days with the clunky Microsoft Desktop development application model. This is why I became a web programmer. Also, I'm leary of Microsoft because isn't this the 3rd time they reprogrammed the interface? I'm just afraid that it's not flexible design wise for constant changes to borders, page layouts, etc.

Well, you're used to accessing it through a web browser, but it IS a desktop application. Whether you use ASP.NET or PHP, you're writing code that's running on the web server. My impression is that languages like PHP limit you to web-related functionality, while ASP.NET also lets you take control of more "desktop-like" features that exist on the server running your code. For example, in a lot of ASP.NET applications I've written, I log requests and exceptions to the database, after generating the page, but I do this on a dedicated thread, so as not to affect the user.

Also, if the site currently lives in ASP Classic, there's a wizard to convert it to .NET; it's not perfect, but it's the path of least resistance.

Finally, you're right that .NET is in its third release, but this is a good thing. v3 is backwards compatible, but every version introduces new features. Master Pages, for example, make constant changes to page layout and borders a piece of cake - once you get over the learning curve. And .NET is fairly simple if it's used well, the whole design theory was to make code that's easy to adapt, instead of code that does everything and never gets touched again.

my suggestion would be to go for PHP because,

PHP 5 is as good as .net or java.

PHP is easy, flexible and reliable

PHP is opensource, Platform Independent

Ok, you have lots of preconceived notions about .NET, so let's dispel them:

1. .NET 2.0 has AJAX extensions and a bunch of controls AND a large third-party base of controls that are WAY cool.

2. .NET still has support for javascript (in fact, that's how it does a lot of stuff), dynamically-generated pages, etc.

3. .NET group is currently working on v3.5, but it's all just additional stuff built on top of .NET 2.0, which is close enough to .NET 1.1 that I was able to quickly migrate applications to it.

4. .NET programming model is as object-oriented as you want to get. You can put objects in separate libraries, re-use those libraries in multiple applications, inherit objects, the whole sh-bang.

I program in both languages/environments and have active customers that use one or the other. I'm agnostic about it. It's better for business (or your career) to not get all caught up in "this is all I know".

I learned C# and ASP.NET in about 3 weeks of intense work. The hardest part I found wasn't the language, it was the whole postback event thing that's built into ASP.NET and is extremely powerful, but also complex until you get in there and debug a web app while it's running and see how the events are working together.

Good luck. I'd recommend getting a full spec written out about what's needed for first release. Then see which language/environment will better handle it without worrying about whether you're an expert in it or not.

I know a company still writing lots of DOS code because that's all their lead programmer knows and the boss can't seem to get rid of him. And their clients and products suffer for it.

if you want to do everything for free, you can easily use .Net. You can run .Net off of a linux box using Mono, and all the development tools are free straight from Microsoft. I have looked into starting to use PHP but found it harder to understand than ASP.Net because I was used to VB. So if you are familiar at all with VB go with .Net in my opinion, all the dev tools are free and so is the server to run it off of.