[thelist] JSP vs ASP vs PHP vs CF

[Shashank Tripathi]

 |  In my opinion JSP and PHP are the best bescause they provide a lot of
 |  sophistication to handle anything you throw at them and they
 |  also run on NT
 |  and LINUX/UNIX which is something I dislike about ASP. CF is
 |  quick to learn
 |  and program but you might find it restictive after a while.


Excellent points Mark, that would very much be my response as well. Both ASP
and CF are tied to specific companies (albeit strong) but I would easily
discount ASP because we had a load of problems when we had to buy a third
party component for email.

Between PHP and JSP, I would easily go for PHP for web based development
purely because of the multitude of readily available functions e.g., some of
my favorites -- strip_tags(), satellite CORBA, Sablotron XSLT parser, LDAP
integ, WDDX (Ok, for this one CF would be great too I bet! ;-)), MCrypt,
Mail, a wonderful array of NNTP functions which we have used to our great
benefit...etc etc. Lets not even think of how many free classes are
available to facilitate really, really quick RAD.

For those who crib about each database having its own functions in PHP, I
should hasten to mention that we have found PEAR DB to be quite usable
already (it might soon be like Perl CPAN). We did a wrapper function for it
and are now using it with great success - almost all our DB access code is a
matter of 10 minutes.

For those who are worried that PHP has a very un-corporate feel to it, and
is not really "enterprise class" or some jazz like that, pls take a look at
www.zend.com. Their products are atrociously priced (thank god!)...so as
they probably intend, they might go pretty well down the corporate palate.

In our experience, it is also the fastest performing server side language -
as was recently corroborated by an (otherwise silly) article on ZDNet as
well...especially when put on Linux/Solaris combination.

Even with PHP one fill one's heart with caching/load balancing/fail over and
all that "enterprise class" sounding balderdash, its just the "spin" of
these app server vendors.

Too many echo and print statements? Pls pls pls take a look at some OO
programming in PHP. We have eliminated most of our inline echoes.

Oh, and try and beat the price of PHP!
;-)

JSP...hmm, what a shameless plug from Sun - daylight robbery from ASP in
terms of concepts and ideas, with a liberal dose of the
Model-View-Controller(MVC) jazz from SmallTalk. This might be old, but some
of the points are still valid:
http://www.servlets.com/soapbox/problems-jsp.html

Having said that, I dont mind the technology especially after tasting some
cost-effective and robust engines like www.orionserver.com, and
www.caucho.com. Try them out, it can be fun.

But none of these beat PHP in pure functionality available at my fingertips
(esp. for web related stuff) and above all, in terms of speed. For Christ's
sake, I needed Oreilly's multihandler class (THIRD PARTY!) to so much as
handle a file upload!

CF -  I have not used it for a long time - I dont remember it as a smashing
tech but things might have changed.

I guess at the end of the day, the most marketable skill is still Java/JSP
and the most useful one in terms of quick development + cost effectiveness
is PHP (IMHO). With the .Net framework, I hope this becomes immaterial..

For the time being, here is how I would rate them:

1. If BUDGET is main criteria, nothing beats Apache + Linux + MySQL + PHP
combo

2. If PERFORMANCE is main criteria, either JSP or PHP, based on BUDGET

3. If CURRENT ENVIRONMENT is main criteria, either the thrust is "We do
Microsoft" in which case we go for ASP (sometimes PHP as well, because the
ISAPI dll works quite well for a site with around 50,000 hits a day - dont
know about more) or the thrust is "We need J2EE and J-Whatever" in which
case we go for JSP.


Of course, my opinions are limited by my own experience, but would love to
hear about
how CF is doing these days...I heard of a product out of Singapore that
claims to give me "complete out of the box" integration for my EAI stuff
using, ahem,  CF. Either the technology has come a looong way, or I am in
the wrong joke!

<Shanx/>



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