PHP vs ASP . NET: A Critique

by Tayyab

Posted on July 25, 2014

In the field of web development there are two big giants PHP and ASP .NET. One is open source and the second one isn’t. But the question is; how to choose the best web framework for web development. Here are the most important factors on which a web developer can easily choose the best framework to work on it according to their skills and clients’ requirements.

Factors for Comparison:

Before starting any project, you should have to keep in mind these factors for your better performance and to gain maximum efficiency.

Cost:

When you are going to start a project “Cost” is the most important factor. While you are using any open source language for your project it will cost you nothing but only your mind and logic 🙂 But when you use a platform which is a product, there might be certain costs associated with that development platform.

Scalability:

When it comes to search out the limits for platforms there can be a great debate between PHP lovers and ASP . NET lovers. Both PHP and ASP . NET is highly scalable. For example the famous social network platform Facebook was originally built in PHP, and the former social network platform MySpace, was built in ASP.NET. Now you can see that both PHP and ASP. NET is highly scalable, as long as the developers know how to scale their project.

Performance:

Performance is the third most important factor for web applications, Most web applications written in PHP follow the LAMP stack – Linux (OS), Apache (server), MySQL (database) and PHP (scripting language). The LAMP stack is extremely popular for web development, so that has been optimized extensively for improved performance.

And the database used by ASP.NET is MSSQL (Microsoft SQL Server). Some can use MySQL with it depending on their capabilities and resource availability. The performance difference between an ASP.NET+MSSQL stack and a PHP+MySQL stack is very small with PHP+MySQL edging out ASP.NET.

Performance at Server side:

What if your application got crashed, or made the server unstable?

Factor that affects performance is the OS and file system used on the server. Most tests indicate that Linux and ext4 file system have better I/O performance than Windows and the NTFS file system. So, there’s a good chance a PHP application running on a Linux web host will slightly outperform a similar ASP.NET application running on a Windows host.

Development Environment Dependencies:

Once there was a time when Notepad was used to create web application in PHP, but with the enhancements and advancements in PHP, many of developers have been shifted on IDEs.

There are many IDE available for this purpose that are very high performance and very friendly along with their features. On the other hand, some of us still prefer to use Notepad++ and like its own kind for programming that even you can use Notepad from windows.

If you want to use any IDE for PHP I’ll recommend Eclipse, it will give you very high performance hand qualitative support while creating any application.

But when it comes to ASP . NET you might find out some IDE that are supportive for ASP . NET but the famous among them is Microsoft Visual Studio. It is a very powerful IDE for creating application in ASP . NET no other IDE can meet its resourcefulness.

Platform Independent:

For PHP development, you don’t need any specific OS set its environment; you can work in Linux, Unix, Windows, OS x and any other open source OS.

But for ASP . NET you are bound to use Windows OS environment, unless there is any OS that has space for ASP . NET or .NET development environment.

Time to Deploy:

It can take a larger amount of code to accomplish complex features and functionality with ASP . NET compared to PHP, adding more time to the development process.

Additionally, PHP is interpreted at the server, so when changing a functionality, no additional steps are required to see the changes. On the other hand, ASP . NET needs to be compiled each time the code is modified. Again, the development process is more time-consuming when using ASP.net as opposed to PHP.

Tayyab