[CLUE-Tech] PHP question for Grant

[Grant Johnson]

Many reasons:
1)  Stability.  If a PHP thread crashes, although I have never been able
to crash one, the whole machine does not go down.  If you crash ASP,
which is easy to do with 3rd part addons, the whole machine needs a
reboot.

2)  Performance.  Every benchmark there will show PHP to be many times
faster.

3)  Portability.  With PHP, I am not locked into one server OS.

4)  Installbase.  PHP is installed as a module on 37.06% of all Apache
servers, surpassing even PERL as a module.  If you want to compare this
to ASP, this makes 6,006,678 PHP installs vs 5,901,507 IIS installs. 
This is not a backroom weird application no one uses.

http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200101/apachemods.html
http://www.netcraft.com/survey

5)  Ease of use.  The language makes sense.  If you can do it in PERL,
C, or a *nix shell, you can probably do it in PHP.  When in doubt, type
it in like you think it should be, and it usually works.

6)  Big one....  Most importantly, and mostly due to the things above,
your developers will not hate you for making them use it.

There are several good articles on why PHP on phpbuilder.com.  

ASP, the second most popular web scripting language HAD 2 advantages on
PHP, session management, and more consistent database management.  The
session management is not in PHP4, and it is better than ASP's.  There
are 2 libs, one called PEAR, and one called PHPLIB that address the
database issue, but I don't like how either one does it, so I am making
my own now.  It should be done soon, and, although it will be written
for PostgreSQL, it could be easily ported to other DBMS's.