[thelist] Server side scripting (JSP vs ASP vs PHP vs CF)

[Joe Crawford]

Check out...
http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/linux/0,12249,2646052,00.html
...not a bad article on this very thing.

Essentially they're all web scripting, server-parsed languages which
allow a full range of web programming, and hooks into databases. They're
all different in terms of what platforms they'll run on (though you can
*force* any of them to run on BSDs, Linuxes, And Windows).

This really gets into religious issues - ASP is a smart call if you have
lots of VB Programmers in house or lots of existing MS infrastructure
(and yes, I know that ASP can be programmed with other languages). CF
has nice fast rapid development times, and it's relatively easy to have
designers be on the programming team without mucking up code. JSP has
the object-oriented-ness of Java on it's side, so if you have a
massively scaling architecture or just want to code really strictly and
allow for growth it's a nice way to go. PHP is open source, and fast,
and free, though is kind of obtuse when it comes to database
connections.

Really, once you understand how to program in one, you can translate
those skills to another language. If you're interested in learning,
learn something you can run on your own box, that you can play with. I
started with PHP because that's what my hosting company provided at the
time I started doing database backed stuff. The segue to Cold Fusion has
been painless. And from the little bit I've seen of ASP it's not so
differnt.

To the list of JSP, ASP, PHP, CF I'll add ACS (which is TCL+Aolserver),
Miva (same idea, but commerce driven), and Perl::Mason, when I worked at
Bidland <http://www.bidland.com/> there was a proprietary scripting
language that the founder had written - so this idea is not a new one.
It's the *principles* that are the thing.

Is this the kind of information you're seeking?

	- Joe <http://artlung.com/>
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