I have come to realize that on average ametuer/small business sites are almost always built with php but high-end/professional sites are almost always built with ASP. Why is this? What makes ASP so much more "professional" than PHP?

Amateur or professional, I haven't noticed this distinction between sites that are created with ASP or PHP. I've seen professionally done sites created with both languages. A data driven company website using ASP typically costs a fair amount of money, so company's with big budgets pay a little more to have a good design.

I'm sure that examples of PHP and ASP that are made by amateurs or small businesses that look professional.

I usually stay away from "debates" like this... but I'll make an exception this one time.

It's the same logic when you want to consider say, ....phpBB or vBulletin? ...Linux or Windows? ...Java or C++? ...my place or your place? ...

Just go with what you know well and you will be fine. As to whether one is more suitable than the other beyond the regular Joe's homepage, who knows? I've seen some really huge sites developed in PHP and they're doing fine.

From my own experiences at work, there are a lot of people that become sceptical of PHP, mySQL etc because it is free. Sounds like a mad logic, but I cannot even convince my IT manager to chuck IE explorer and use Firefox instead on the basis that it doesn't come from an official CD (well actually it can do, but I'm not paying $5 for something I can download in 3 minutes.

The point of me saying this is that its worth trying out both, there are a lot less security holes likely in a program like PHP and Apache, just because of the amount of people using it day in day out and the fact that people also swear by it.

Rob

Ha! I had the same discussion with my manager this morning. We were trying to figure out the "mad logic". He's not your typical manager - he actually knows something about technology, and he's only been my manager the past 5 months - the previous guy got canned for embezelling from the company (thank God... we were all so sick of him).

Anyway, from our experience, having a manager who isn't really up on the technology, who may also make decisions because he don't understand it, alot of manager will stick with the "safe" route - get something that costs money. The reasoning is that the things that cost money, typically come with some support, and if people are paying money for these things, it must be worth it. These manager think "If its free, it has no support, and no value".

Craziness! I can see taking this conservative route at times, but with PHP and MySQL, or FireFox? Yikes! It took some convincing, but I did get my previous manager to go along with allowing me to use PHP and MySQL for the first web e-commerce solution I put together, 3 years ago.

Well, this gives me a lot to think about. I have been using PHP for quite some time now and i have also used VB for some time. Maybe i'll give ASP a try. Does it work better with Oracle?

Honestly, from my experience, ASP will probably work with Oracle, but I'm not going to say it works any better than another solution.

As far as coding with ASP, I think its painful. PHP allows for much easier database access, and better, overall programming. ASP deals with syntax that is completely proprietary to MicroSoft. As I started writing some ASP code, I felt like I was writing with some advanced macro language. Another reason ASP code costs more - its a real pain to program. I suppose if you're used to using the Access VBA, or MicroSoft's .NET flavor of VB, ASP is somewhat similar, but not completely.

Personally, I prefer PHP. As far as the display and professional look, PHP should have nothing to do with it - that's the job of a web designer. When it all comes down to it, PHP and ASP can each do the important tasks needed of a web page. Both use HTML to display the output.

Its like saying, I'm going to use brand A pencil (ASP using HTML), or I might use brand B pencil (PHP using HTML) to do my drawing. They're both pencils.... but I ask myself, "Am I am professional or amateur artist?" In my mind, I check the box, "amateur". If I put either pencil in the hand of a professional artist, I'll get professional looking drawings.

That's a good example that makes total sense. Thanks.

Somewhat. ASP is based on Visual Basic syntax, which has it's roots naturally in BASIC. So only part of the syntax is proprietary. It's DB access is also based on M$'s database access forms (RDO,ADO,DAO) which can be a pain to use. It looks like PHP is based more on the open standards and a tighter use of SQL -- but I'm not certain.

at this stage of my experience of php I can say that it is at some other level compared to asp because of the advantages of the open source theory. The language has the freedom to always become better and more usefull...is this not true?