Hello

We are developing an ERP system.

My question:Should it be developed in PHP or ASP.NET??

What's the best solution??

What's the best enviorment for the development??

Any alternatives and suggestion would be welcomed.

Thank you

Although, IMHO, PHP is a much better language, ASP is preferred amongst most companies as it is a Microsoft solution.

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It would depend on your target platform, and what kind of market you are aiming this for.

Most small businesses will already have a Windows server infrastructure (of some sort) -- so .NET would be the logical choice there.

It depends what the application is to do. Are you writing a windows application too?

ASP.NET looks like a good solution. I would supposed that ERP would mean that this is a medium to large business. With ASP.NET, you could hook on to MS SQL which would allow you to scale. Besides ASP.NET framework is has all your business objects encased in a nicely packed compiled DLL running in the background. Any compiled application will indeed run faster than any scripted language.

In the end, it depends on the platform you are developing for.

By the way, although ASP and ASP.NET are fundamentally Microsoft technology but the internal framework is pretty much different. ASP is scripted like PHP but ASP.NET front end is ASP based but the back-end is compiled into a DLL and relied on the .NET framework.

Originally posted by fhameed
Hello

We are developing an ERP system.

My question:Should it be developed in PHP or ASP.NET??

What's the best solution??

What's the best enviorment for the development??

Any alternatives and suggestion would be welcomed.

Thank you That's not a simple question to answer. It depends on a lot of factors. For example, are you developing it for a specific client (including your own company)? If so, they probably have a preference as to whether or not they want to embrace an M.S. architecture or an open source architecture.

If you are developing it for resale*, I'd suggest you go with the open source architecture. Why? Because of a lot of reasons, costs not being the least significant. If you use PHP's generic db api (forget what it's call--I'm sleepy), you could potentially use anything from MySQL or Postgres to Oracle for the backend db.

I saw on your profile that you live in Pakistan. If you are developing for an international customer base, or for anyone for whom cost vs. performance is an issue, go with PHP. It will run on MS platforms anyway.

*beyond that, if you're developing it for resale, I'd say forget it. That market is saturated. Speaking of which, why don't you want to use an off-the-shelf package?

You need to get a handle on your customers and their needs.

I'd personally think that the required scalability is something to establish quickly.

If we are both thinking the same thing by "ERP" then you will almost certainly need to be able to scale significantly and also to interface with customers' database systems -- everything from Oracle to SQL Server to even MySQL. You will also very likely have to use a Windows platform, as that's what your customers will use.

It only takes a few minutes thought to make ASP.NET the prime candidate (over PHP at any rate). It is, by the way, a totally different animal to normal ASP. It's all compiled (the .NET framework looks after that) and can offer real scalability. You may actually find that for out and out performance a more traditional ISAPI DLL architecture, seriously tuned, will win out. I emphasise the "seriously tuned".

I can recommend J2EE solutions. It have more advantages than MS products. You don't depend on OS platform, and can install it on *nix or windows. The combination of J2EE+Oracle is more powerful, securable and affordable, than ASP.NET+MSSQL