At work I have been writing all our Intranet stuff in ASP, but I more recently started learning PHP and our intranet server has PHP installed as well as ASP.
So what is the best one for writing a database driven intranet?
Feel free to ask specific questions to help you give your opinion.
Things are far enough along, technologically, that I’d think either would be fine. The only caveat I’d present is: If you’re drinking at the Microsoft trough, it’s hard to turn away from it. There’s just enough feature lock-in to make a mid-course correction painful.
(Says the guy who just spent a week reviewing Portal Server, only to find that his audience isn’t all ‘IE6 or greater with Sharepoint Aware Applications™’)
Is your intranet server a Windows machine with PHP installed, or a Linux server with ASP capabilities?
If it’s a Windows server, you’re best off sticking with ASP. I’ve had problems on my Windows servers with PHP/MySQL scripts. It could very well be that we were mis-managing PHP and MySQL but ASP on Windows “just works.”
Unintentionally Blank is right, though. PHP can work “both ways” (Windows or Linux) while ASP is best served on Windows.
As for which language is “best” … I tend to feel that it’s the language you’re most proficient with. I am highly proficient with ASP but I don’t knock PHP. I assume it’s just as good.
Are you talking Classic ASP or ASP.NET?
I don’t have any experience with ASP but I have used J2EE, which is roughly the Java equivalent of the enterprise side of .NET. I’d say that PHP is better for rapid development of smaller web applications while .NET can be better for larger applications, especially in terms of scalability(however, that may not be an issue on a corporate intranet. PHP can really start to show the signs of strain when you get the huge amounts of traffic you see on large Internet sites.)
Another thing to consider is that you probably don’t want to fragment your web development across two languages or more languages. So if you need .NET features for certain portions of one of your web applications then I’d suggest sticking with it for the rest of them.
The server is Windows with PHP. And Asp.net (though for some reason most of my asp learning has led me down the path of learning the older style asp than aspx (net2.0 ??)
I guess I’ll just use the PHP capabilities to practice PHP and play with it using the massive database I have at my erm… can’t say disposal.
I need to ask my IT Manager to switch on the PHP error reporting, or whatever he needs to do to get my browser to show me the errors when my code doesn’t work.