PHP is the best language for web programing, but what
about other languages?
ASP is not really a language in itself, it's an
acronym for Active Server Pages, the actual language
used to program ASP with is Visual Basic Script or
JScript. The biggest drawback of ASP is that it's a
proprietary system that is natively used only on
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). This
limits it's availability to Win32 based servers. There
are a couple of projects in the works that allows ASP
to run in other environments and webservers:
InstantASP from Halcyon
(commercial), Chili!Soft ASP from Chili!Soft (commercial) and OpenASP
from ActiveScripting.org (free). ASP is said to be
a slower and more cumbersome language than PHP, less
stable as well. Some of the pros of ASP is that since
it primarily uses VBScript it's relatively easy to pick
up the language if you're already know how to program
in Visual Basic. ASP support is also enabled by default
in the IIS server making it easy to get up and running.
The components built in ASP are really limited, so if
you need to use "advanced" features like interacting
with FTP servers, you need to buy additional
components.
Yes, asp2php is the one most often referred
to.
PHP is commonly said to be faster and more
efficient for complex programming tasks and trying out
new ideas. PHP is generally referred to as more stable
and less resource intensive as well. Cold Fusion has
better error handling, database abstraction and date
parsing although database abstraction is addressed in
PHP 4. Another thing that is listed as one of Cold
Fusion's strengths is its excellent search engine, but
it has been mentioned that a search engine is not
something that should be included in a web scripting
language. PHP runs on almost every platform there is;
Cold Fusion is only available on Win32, Solaris, Linux
and HP/UX. Cold Fusion has a good IDE and is generally
easier to get started with, whereas PHP initially
requires more programming knowledge. Cold Fusion is
designed with non-programmers in mind, while PHP is
focused on programmers.
A great summary by Michael J Sheldon on this topic
has been posted to the PHP mailing list. A copy can be
found here.
The biggest advantage of PHP over Perl is that PHP
was designed for scripting for the web where Perl was
designed to do a lot more and can because of this get
very complicated. The flexibility / complexity of Perl
makes it easier to write code that another author /
coder has a hard time reading. PHP has a less confusing
and stricter format without losing flexibility. PHP is
easier to integrate into existing HTML than Perl. PHP
has pretty much all the 'good' functionality of Perl:
constructs, syntax and so on, without making it as
complicated as Perl can be. Perl is a very tried and
true language, it's been around since the late
eighties, but PHP is maturing very quickly.