Hi all,

We have a new project under way here and we've been asked to pick
platforms. For ease of use, we're looking seriously at PHP. This would
offer us far more "plug-in" functionality from the Open Source world.

I've been asked to write a document argues for the use of PHP over our
current platform, ASP.

If anyone has gone through this process, let me know! Also if you have
any startling revelations as to why PHP is brilliant... tell me

If you develop, why do you use PHP instead of another language?

SpaceGirl wrote:
I am presently going through this same analysis. Our project was
developed in ASP, and we're thinking of converting it to PHP. The
problem with ASP is that we have to use a Windows server, which is more
expensive, more complicated, and less reliable (in my opinion) than a
tried-and-true Linux server. I am very interested in other responses to
this question.

SpaceGirl wrote:
One organization I know about spent $7K about 4 years ago to convert a
site from Perl to ASP. One of the worst mistakes (amongst many) they
ever made - at least on the website. The site is expensive to maintain,
slower than the equivalent in PHP and just in general difficult to
maintain. Glad I'm not doing it - but I hear about it all the time.

I'm trying to convince them they should convert to PHP, but they're
balking at the price there, also.

--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
==================

Fleeing from the madness of the http://groups.google.com jungle
SpaceGirl <nothespacegirlspam@subhuman.net> stumbled into
news:alt.www.webmaster
and said:

Greetings

'here' being your day job? are they really interested in O/S solutions at
the application level?

In general - can't think of any reason. Of course, there may be very good
reasons to use PHP for any particular project.

Same reasons as ASP/vbScript ...

o so simple anyone can do it.
Caution: just because it's easy to do doesn't mean it's easy to do well.

o millions of code examples available.
Caution: most of the code examples on the web are not examples of good
coding practice.

I don't - well I hack but that's about the limit.

Seriously there's far more to this than the choice of language - your
project manager should know this - I suspect they've pushed this onto you
to bury it (or you).

--
William Tasso

whither a trophy?

William Tasso wrote:
Day job. Not looking to move to anything for my freelance stuff.

The project is an Intranet. Currently written in ASP running on
ChilliSoft ASP fake thing ontop of Sun ONE server. Horrible. Cannot be
extended with any standard ASP components.

I, of course, prefer ASP as this is a language I know really well. But
for the type of very large Intranet we're working on we need to plug-in
stuff from elswhere (OS stuff we can mod, for example). We're not
looking to use an existing CMS. PHP/MySQL seems a less painful route
without us having to replace our servers.

True.

Again, true.

We dont have a PM yet - this is pre-PM stuff. Platform investigations
before we approach the PTB and kick the project off/resource it.

mcp6453 wrote:
Eventually we want to go down the .net route, but we cannot replace the
servers in the near future and we've totally hit a limit to what we can
do with ASP (given we're not using "real" ASP, just the SunONE fake
version). I'd be quite happy to switch to Windows servers, but we wont
be allowed. PHP gives us some flexibility - we can run it on our
existing boxes and should we convince "them" to let us switch to
Windows later on, we can run PHP ontop of IIS without any problems...

Pondering the eternal question of "Hobnobs or Rich Tea?", SpaceGirl
finally proclaimed:

Well there is reason number 1. ASP, running as it is, does not live up
to the standard that you are required to complete the project to.

#1 The current solution (ie. platform on specified hardware) is not good
enough

And there's your second (and third) reason! You can migrate to PHP
without having to upgrade/replace your hardware (and probably software),
whereas if you were to continue using ASP then the current server set-up
is inadequate.

2# The new solution will not have any new cost

3# Because of reason 1, the old solution may require additional funding

--
Dylan Parry
http://electricfreedom.org -- Where the Music Progressively Rocks!

Fleeing from the madness of the http://groups.google.com jungle
SpaceGirl <nothespacegirlspam@subhuman.net> stumbled into
news:alt.www.webmaster
and said:

agreed - thoroughly horrible indeed. Any platform would be a step up -
including PHP. Have you considered PERL?

--
William Tasso

whither a trophy?

"SpaceGirl" <nothespacegirlspam@subhuman.net> wrote:

I do not know anything about ASP.

Whether PHP is suitable for your project depends on the project. High
traffic sites want C, not PHP. Sites with a lot of intelligence in
their workings may want C, not PHP.

Sites with below-massive traffic levels that need some intelligence
but not huge amounts of ingelligence may be reasonable PHP candidates.

PHP is a decent prototyping language, you can put something together
in a hurry and find out if the concept works, where it needs
adjusting, and so forth. Like any other interpretive language there
is a processor-usage penalty, not huge but if you're on a shared
server doing lots of logic it can be enough to get your process bumped
while the next guy gets a slice so it tends to magnify.

If you push PHP to the limit as I have, you will learn that the
language itself contains some gotchas. Little things that can make
you nuts... file_exists() returns a cached value instead of a realtime
one unless you clear the cache, unset() needs special goofy handling
to unset a global array root, so on and so-forth. I have completely
avoided PHP's object-oriented aspects, using it as a procedural
language and making the result solid is challenging enough.

PHP itself has a lot of bolt-ons, and there are lots of bolt-on free
apps out there. Whether you want to use them is another question.

It has its place. Without some understanding of the traffic levels
involved and the amount of processing logic involved, I don't think
it's possible to really make any recommendation. The initial version
of my ecommerce store will release in PHP assuming it's completed
before old age overtakes me, if there are sufficient customers to
warrent it I'll immediately begin rewriting it in C.

I've heard Perl well spoken of but I know nothing about it either.

If the people you work for have already decided to use PHP and they
want you to justify it for them, I would suggest that you immediately
begin circulating your resume.

--
http://www.ren-prod-inc.com/hug_soft...action=contact

hug wrote:

I think Yahoo would disagree with you here... not to mention me. There's
a time and place for all things. Not only is PHP perfectly suited (by
design) for the web, it has hundreds of stable production-ready software
packages just waiting for you to download them. LAMP with Smarty is
pretty web savvy... what has C got that's better suited for web
deployment? I'm not knocking C (far from it, I have respect for the
language), it's just that the only reason I'd see for choosing it over
PHP for a web site is because one already knows C. If I had the budget
to hire another web developer, PHP would be my first choice.

--
David Hennessy
http://maidix.com/