Web Programmers – The Unsung Heroes
“ WOW, what a beautiful site !” is a common exclamation that comes to ones lips on encountering an eye pleasing Website.
The design, the colors, the aesthetic appeal all convey your compliments to the Web designer, who worked on the graphical interface of the Website, perhaps with the same diligence as the Web programmer who tied it up neatly with the back-end coding.
However, few people are capable of appreciating the dynamism that coding lends to an otherwise static Website. The comfort of placing an order on the Net using your credit card, the luxury of watching movies on your computer , the ease of being able to book a ticket online and all such bells and whistles are made possible through Web programming.
Had the web technologies not progressed beyond HTML , internet would have been no different than digital books and far less fascinating and useful than it is now.
So, what does back-end Web programming do to a Website ? Well, to put it simply it makes a Website interact with you. For any offered functionality, Web programming causes you to input data and then generates a relevant output for you.
Even static sites are basically just HTML code but it only displays a Website as a graphical interface with text and images and nothing beyond that. Needless to say how boring Net would have been if Websites were just HTML.
A lot of hard work and system analysis goes in a Website that is even moderately interactive. Since it is going to talk with it’s users Web programmers put in a lot of effort to make sure that a site is smart enough to provide right output to your queries, is secure and all functionality in a given Website is linear and neat.
This is not to undermine the efforts of the Web designers for they are every bit as important as Web programmers to say the least. However though Web designers are indispensible for all kinds of sites, their role diminishes in proportion to the level of interactivity a given site has. Should you want to have amazon.com replicated your focus would be more on interactive functionality than design. In any case, such heavy duty sites are less design intensive.
And should a pointed question be asked as to whether a Web designer or a Web programmer is more relevant to the current sophistication that Net has reached in communicative technologies, then the answer would most certainly be the Web programmer.
So next time you wow a Website that has offered you a cool online planner to your trip to the Bahamas, know it for sure that more than just design has gone into that site.
PHP vs ASP.NET?
Yes, the war is still on ! And it has intensified ever since.
Arrived in late 90s, PHP came as a cool breeze and saved the programmers from tedious and time consuming perl coding. Earlier version of PHP was just a sample set of perl scripts created by Rasmus Lerdorf to automate few processes. PHP 3.0 was the first version that closely resembled PHP as we know it today. One of the biggest strengths of PHP 3.0 was its strong extensibility features. In addition to providing end users with a solid infrastructure for lots of different databases, protocols and APIs, PHP 3.0's extensibility features attracted dozens of developers to join in and submit new extension modules. Arguably, this was the key to PHP 3.0's tremendous success. Other key features introduced in PHP 3.0 were the object oriented syntax support and the much more powerful and consistent language syntax. The current version of PHP at the time of writting this article is PHP 5.3.1
ASP.net on the other hand, got into life in early 2000s with the release of .net framework 1.0. The important thing to note here is that ASP.NET is the next generation ASP, but it's not an upgraded version of ASP. ASP.NET is an entirely new technology for server-side scripting. It was written from the ground up and is not backward compatible with the classic ASP. Over the last few years, ASP.NET has gone through a few evolutions, from ASP.NET 1.0 to 1.1, 2.0, 3.5 and now to ASP.NET 4.0 with release of Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0.
Now, the comparision.....
Lets cover point by point the weakness and strengths of both before we arrive to a conclusion.
| Feature | PHP | ASP.NET |
| Easy of use | PHP is definitely the easiest to learn and adapt to among the two. It also requires less system resources to code in PHP - a simple windows notepad would do. | ASP.net, not very tedious though, but is a bit difficult to learn when it comes into direct comparison with PHP. It also needs more powerful computer to work in Visual Studio Environment. |
| Database Support | PHP provides native support for a number of popular databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, DBM, Oracle, Informix, MSSQL etc. In case your database isn't natively supported, you can connect via protocol-based functions (ODBC, LDAP etc) | ASP.NET only provides native support to MSSQL database. For other databases you can use protocol-based functions. |
| Execution Speed | This is the area where ASP.NET has a marginal edge over PHP. PHP is programmed without the benefit of connection pooling, or in-memory session state. Unlike precompiled code in ASP.NET, PHP is interpreted on-the-fly which also contributes to a slowdown. There are contrasting opinions, benchmark results available on the internet claiming one language to be better than the other but I feel that the difference is not very huge and should not effect your selection process of selecting either of the language for a given project. | ASP.NET provides persistent connection pools, better session management and precompiled machine code which helps it score over PHP. |
| Support | Here, PHP clearly wins over ASP.NET. The main reason for it is that PHP is open source and its support comes from across the world which also means that bugs are fixed almost instantly. There is also a large repository of reusable code and third party applications available scattered through out the net. | ASP.NET, though very well supported by Microsoft and its users across the world fails by a margin to PHP. |
| Development Time |
This comparison goes in favor of ASP.NET. PHP has a number of rapid application development environments like Zend, CakePHP etc but they are in no comparision with Microsoft's Visual Studio. | Excellent development environment and default web form architecture helps code faster in asp.net in comparison to PHP. Another application suits like Visual Source Safe or Team Suite helps better code management and allows multiple developers to work simultenously on a project. |
As you can see, both the platforms are equally comparable and go neck to neck in all the comparisons. So, which language to choose for your web design project ? I would suggest you to choose a language based upon your constraints e.g. if delivery time is your point of concern than you can go for ASP.NET and if you worried more about support than go for PHP. If you are an end client and not sure about the above technical jargon then simply pick any of the above - you can never be wrong with either.
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