Classic ASP vs PHP for a new web application

Question

I am going to create a new web application. My PHP skills are slightly above average - I would not put myself under corporate coding. However, my classic ASP skills are strong, and I used to program VB in classic ASP before for powerful websites.

I am going to make an advertising network in the market - buying and selling online advertising space. This would be a CDN with support for CDN JS and CDN images with DNS and balancing of mySQL cluster servers.

What are all the thoughts? I understand Nginx cannot start Windows?

The classic ASP for notes, IMO, still handles and works well on some sites. My concern for the future, speed and performance. Security on classic ASP and PHP - well, classic ASP with VB wins for me.

Answer 1

The question invites a rather subjective answer. However, I will try to be objectively subjective.

Starting with 5.3, PHP is the best choice in my opinion.

Also, if you really intend to create it for scalability, I would suggest looking at a cloud service like Amazon Web Services for your server (EC2), CDN (S3 + CloudFront) and database (RDS). If you plan to use Nginx, there are good http://scalr.net/ configuration options for working with multiple clouds, including AWS.

Answer 2

Even if you know that classic ASP is better than PHP, classic ASP has been out of date for almost ten years :

It [ASP.NET] was first released in January 2002 with version 1.0 of the .NET Framework and is the successor to Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) technology.

I would not start a new project with technology that has been outdated for ten years.

I don't know if Nginx works on Windows, but you can definitely run PHP and mySQL on Windows. Windows installers for mySQL and maybe even run PHP on IIS .

Answer 3

Why is this even a question? Classic ASP is deprecated. When do you expect the next version of Classic ASP? When do you expect even the next patch?

Now ask yourself the same questions about PHP.

To paraphrase an old TV guide ad, "Get it?" Got her? Good.

I would recommend none of the two, and go with ASP.NET MVC. This is closer in pattern to the classic ASP, and I believe that you can even program it in the same pattern - do not use the model, use one controller that takes the view name as a parameter and does all the work in the view.

Answer 4

My recommendation would be PHP because it scales well, has wide community support, a wide variety of IDEs and editors, a solid framework, and is widely used as the technology of choice for web technologies. My experience with ASP was a long time ago and was rather cumbersome, but PHP with all the mentioned features and more like OO works fine. PHP is currently on a sustainable basis in the field of web development.

Answer 5

Many people still use classic ASP all the time. Therefore, if your strengths are, go and use them. I know that I still have to use it every day.

If you say that your skills are so strong in ASP, you should have no problem switching to PHP. After a couple of hours with a good code book, you can get through. Here is a basic cross-reference guide for ASP and PHP.

http://www.design215.com/toolbox/asp.php

Answer 6

I know this is very late, but some may find it useful. One of the main disadvantages of Classic ASP is the lack of rewriting of the mod or equivalent.