When carrying out the development task of a website or web app, even the most experienced programmers can be puzzled — how to choose the programming language. The most common choice is between PHP and ASP.NET. However, both PHP and ASP.NET have huge user bases, and each programmer’s opinion on PHP and ASP.NET depends on their development experience and preferences. So the choice may depend more on preference. There’s no clear answer here, but this article will help you identify the differences between PHP and ASP.NET and make a choice based on your preferences, so you can complete tasks more smoothly in your development project. Platform and server Platform and server are definitely the main difference between the two, and this must be recognized. PHP is a cross-platform, server-side embedded scripting language that can run freely on Linux, UNIX, Mac OS, or Windows. On the other hand, ASP.NET is an object-oriented, compiled language. You can’t run PHP in a Windows program, but you can copy ASP.NET code and put it into a WinForm program with little modification. Moreover, ASP.NET is limited to the Windows platform. Therefore, it has actually lost the open-source advantage here — low cost and a highly supportive technical community. Speed and performance Most programmers think there’s no real difference in performance and speed between PHP and ASP.NET. But it’s true, as long as you use PHP and ASP.NET on smaller or less complex projects, you won’t find much difference. However, if it’s a larger web app that needs to run more large programs, the programming language will affect speed to some extent. Second, the choice between PHP and ASP.NET must also consider the diversity of tasks. The following examples illustrate:
- Starting with the simplest task, the app needs to access the database, process a query task, and transmit the processing result to the browser via the server. In this process the programming language has almost no big impact on speed/difference, but the database server and query program may have some impact.
- Running an app on Linux or UNIX gives you the advantage of saving precious resources, which are consumed by the GUI and extra packages, especially when running on Windows.
- When it comes to finding and sending images to the server by accessing the file system, PHP may perform better, but this is thanks to Linux and the ext4 file system being superior to Windows OS and NTFS.
Development, installation, and deployment Most experienced programmers who have used both languages agree: developing a project on ASP.NET takes more time. The reason is that it requires many lines of code, and second, each piece of code needs to be compiled after being decorated. In terms of installation and deployment, because ASP.NET has many features in the Windows OS, ASP.NET also provides more caching. However, Linux has kept up with the latest version of ASP.NET, making more reasonable simplifications in usability. Scalability From the above, it seems to advocate using PHP, but in terms of scalability, ASP.NET is the real winner. ASP.NET uses C#, so it can provide stronger object-oriented support. Finally, whether to choose PHP or ASP.NET mainly depends on your skills, experience, and of course the needs of the client. Ideally, you’d master both languages and be equally at ease with either — that would be best.