I am thinking about using php

[mre2mpo]

I am considering using PHP to build my website that will interact with a medium sized database is this the best language to use.

What are the plus points of using PHP?
Dose PHP have any weaknesses

Are their any better alternatives such as ColdFusion, JSP, ASP and Perl?

What are their strengths and weaknesses?

[bcarl314]

Well, personally, I think if you post this question in the php forum, you're going to get some "skewed" results. But, here's my take.

PERL = Very robust for networking and file handling. Slower on other things, but when used with mod_perl can be very VERY fast.

ASP = Well, it's microsoft, so you're stuck with them if you want to develop. Which usually means high start up costs.

JSP = Very fast, very compicated. Especially if you're going to use serlvets / JavaBeans.

Cold Fusion = Don't have any experience, but from what I've heard, it can be very fast, but it's also very expensive for start up costs.

Hope this helps.

[firepages]

not going to argue with Bcarl's summation except to say that JSP is NOT fast, its quite slow.

PHP is probably faster than cgi-PERL/vanillaASP/CFM/JSP not sure about C#/.NET but all the talk so far has been just that, talk ;)

mod_perl is fast and in some applications will probably be faster.

Probability is that 9-11 million domains are unlikely to be wrong, PHP probably gives the best power/speed/ease of use combo that there is

Ok, 9-11 million bad domains may say something different but PHP is used from your cousin Joes homepage to tens of thousands of medium sized database driven sites to big corporate stuff a la Deutche-Bank, Lufthansa, bits of Google etc, in fact the worlds largest website Yahoo! is moving all of its future scripting to PHP, they actually find it easier than thier own proprietry C++ based language !

PHP owns IMO not just because you can learn the basics of it in a few days but also has raw functionality that gives you the ability to do some very complex/hardcore stuff where CFM/ASP would cark it, & JAVA would require a much steeper learning curve to achieve.

PHP can be used for shell scripting, socket programing , web-services, image manipulation , COM/JAVA interoperability , GUI stuff not to mention your average website.

but I would say that ;)

[brothercake]

Originally posted by firepages
PHP owns IMO not just because you can learn the basics of it in a few days but also has raw functionality that gives you the ability to do some very complex/hardcore stuff

My sentiments exactly

[bassleader]

We've been using ASP at work for a while now, but we find the hosting quite expensive and, well, it's Microsoft. Therefore I've started visiting this board a bit more!

From what I know about Java and JSP it is fairly slow and the learning curve is really steep (I don't know your background, but if you've never coded in Java before expect to take months rather than minutes to get started). However, if you're in a really big organization and the rest of your system is based around Java then it starts to make a bit more sense. On the bright side, Tomcat (i.e. Java) server is free if you want to start learning, though "proper" Java servers cost megabucks.

I don't know much about ColdFusion, besides the fact it's expensive.

If I'm talking bunk here feel free to put me straight!

BL