PHP vs. ASP.NET for development platforms

[lconvoy]

Hey all. I have tried my hand at some simple programming in both ASP.NET and PHP. Now I am pitching a complex website to some investors where I will be outsourcing to professional developers. I must decide between PHP and ASP.NET platforms.

In my experience, ASP.NET seems to offer a lot more than PHP but PHP certainly seems to do enough for most any website.

The big difference, then seems to be in price in the long term. ASP.NET would require major software costs to scale the website.

I guess I'm wondering if there are major advantages to one platform over the other and what people's opinions are on developing from a robust and scalable platform.

Much appreciated,
Andrew

[tgreer]

More is not always better. The choice for outsourced development, however, usually comes down to long-term maintainability. I find ASP.NET to be extremely burdensome from a support and maintenance perpsective.

[lconvoy]

Thanks for the reply. Would you care to share some specific maintainability issues?

I guess what I'm most interested in knowing what, if anything, I would be potentially missing out on by going the PHP-route? In light of your concerns over long-term maintainability, are there are any long-term advantages to using ASP.NET?

Much appreciated,
Andrew

[tgreer]

You'd be missing out on nothing. PHP or ASP.NET, both simply generate HTML and/or JavaScript and CSS. The end result is the same. Both have server-side access to databases.

ASP.NET is more complex, and in my opinion, that is a bad thing. There is huge overhead in creating complex server objects that insulate the coder from the reality of the client-server nature of web development, and from the HTML that is generated.

ASP.NET vs. PHP then is not a debate about "capability".

If I were in your shoes, I think I'd be more concerned about the availability of good coders in either language. I think you'll find there are a great many more PHP coders than ASP.NET coders, but that the quality range is similarly much greater with PHP.

[ManicCW]

You can do "everything" with both languages. I personaly use asp.net. I thing asp.net is developing much faster than php and with asp.net 2 and 3 you have full object oriented programming.

[lconvoy]

Thanks for the feedback. My feeling from the beginning is that LAMP is the way to go considering that it is robust and scalable both as a programming platform and as a business decision.

In the end, I have to present the whole proposition to investors that are not exactly technically-oriented where cost of development and maintenance will be a large part of their decision. Considering that MS platform is so much more expensive there would have to be ample justification to choose that platform. Essentially, I am looking for someone to convince me that ASP.NET is soooo much better of a platform that it justifies the thousands more just to be on that platform. So far, seems like PHP will do the job and ASP.NET does not offer that much more

[ManicCW]

It is great, but you can do it all in php ... and even in java. :D