Hi, I'm primarily a windows user and don't know the difference in PHP and ASP and am planning to host some sites soon. How hard is it to convert ASP to PHP? or is it possible to run pages that has asp extensions in a site that does not ASP development?

They are very different languages... in both stucture and syntax.

Primarily ASP is for Windows hosts and PHP for Unix/Linux (there are versions of both for other operating systems but they don't tend to work as well).

so if my clients are primarily windows users then its not a good idea to get a unix host?

Just because your clients are primarily windows users does not mean you should use windows hosting. Same the other way.

What exactly do you want to be able to do? That is the main question. It depends on your needs and your clients.

Read these:

http://www.nexus.net.pk/unix_vs_windows.php

http://www.4geeksandalaptop.com/hosting/unix_vs_windows.html

http://www.ratemyhost.com/articles/article5.php

http://hosting.jmwebdesigns.com/products/virtual/plans/unix-v-win.html

http://www.hostway.com/webhosting/unix_vs_windows.htm

I have had good luck with asp2php, a tool which converts (as the name suggests) converts (vb-script) ASP code to PHP. Obviously this isn't the perfect solution, as there are more optimal ways to do certain tasks in PHP, so I often will recode by hand when doing an ASP-->PHP project. Even with the util, you'll have to check the code for issues. Here is the URL: http://asp2php.naken.cc/

You can also check out Sun One ASP (previously Chilisoft) at the sun web site, but it runs about $500 per server license. This would let you run regular ASP on a unix web server (if you must... yuck).

Apache also has an ASP module that supports ASP objects, but not the commonly used vb dialect of ASP. You have to use ECMA-script for this, so it would be almost pointless unless you want to use ASP, or you already have ECMA style ASP (aka JavaScript).

--Paul



To answer your question about the difference between ASP and PHP, here is a brief rundown:
*ASP is proprietary; PHP is Free (as in price and Freedom).
*PHP has a large community developing free modules and extending the language. ASP has Microsoft and third party companies developing costly analogues.
*PHP runs on Unix-like systems. ASP runs primarily on Windows.

I was also in the same position, most of my clients were hosted on a windows server. After some analysis we found out that only 10% of them were using Windows features such as ASP and Access databases. Some of them were using ASPMail for submitting form info to their email accounts. We proposed to have two services. We moved the 90% to a Linux server and lowered the price for hosting, and kept the other 10% in a Windows server. Everybody was happy for the price reduction...

thanks for all your inputs.. i'll check them out ..one by one heheh

I'd highly recommend PHP, as it's a very portable language.

ASP can be run in some forms on non-Win32 hosts (such as Chilisoft ASP) but you're limited in syntax + functionality (only supports PerlScript syntax, little or no COM support).

We have clients running PHP apps on every major hosting platform (Linux -- RH/SuSE/Debian, FreeBSD, Solaris, Win32) without requiring any code changes.

If you decided to change webserver platforms later, you'd be secure knowing your (and your client's) PHP code is portable.

As cheap as servers are these days, there's nothing stopping you from running PHP boxes and ASP boxes -- as required by your customer base.

Some of the links above with ASP to PHP comparisons are very good, I'd suggest ya take a look.

Have a good weekend!

I thought chillisoft (Sun One) let you use VBscript (it was apache asp which was perl).

However I don't believe the unix version lets you use COM objects.

Well the difference is simple.

PHP requires linux platform and ASP requires windows. There is no conversion tool available to convert PHP to ASP. Its programming not a image thingie :)

If you will go for Linux hosting then it will be cheaper then windows and it will only support PHP. Some hosting providers support ASP on Linux platform through ASP CHILLE software but it is not recommended.

On windows platform you can get good support for ASP and as well some providers also support PHP.

check out hostingpeoplebiz web site.

This package is a stater package and support ASP and PHP.

You are sort of on the right line, yes the natural operating system for PHP is Linux or Unix where as ASP for Windows. ASP.net is windows only at the moment although I believe mono is coming on quite well.

PHP on Windows, however runs pretty much the same way as on Linux with a few minor differences, which are documented in the PHP manual.