Now we are going to examine some programming languages used to build dynamic websites that interact with databases. These languages run on the web server. They are a major step up from traditional web page development languages such as HTML which run on the client computers. The Open Source product is PHP (which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor in case you wanted to know). The Microsoft competitors are ASP (Active Server Pages) and ASP.NET (Active Server Pages in the Microsoft .NET environment.) ASP.NET is more expensive, more complicated, and more powerful than its sibling. For simplicity's sake we will refer to Microsoft's offerings as ASP.

As you know PHP is free. ASP is also free but may require Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Server) which is not free. Uploading, downloading files, encrypting passwords, and sending emails from web pages will probably cost you much more money with ASP than with PHP. As discussed in our previous article (Reason 5 Linux, Apache, and MySQL) LAMP's database management system is either free or quite inexpensive when used with massive databases. In contrast Microsoft's SQL Server is pricey. I should let you know that my Internet Service Provider usually charges for MySQL accessibility. When available SQL Server access will cost more. We have been through the monetary issues before. Let's compare some other aspects of these two web programming languages.

Perhaps not surprisingly ASP resembles Microsoft's popular Visual Basic programming language. PHP is based on the C++ programming language, a much more professional solution than Visual Basic. For technical reasons PHP programs tend to run faster than their ASP counterparts, even if the latter requires more powerful hardware. Because it is open source, PHP has access to a wider range of individuals who increase its functionality. PHP talks to a wide range of databases, but especially focuses on MySQL databases. In contrast ASP works best with SQL Server. While you can mix and match these components you are usually best off to combine components on the same side of the LAMP/Microsoft fence. After all, they were built to work together.

Despite Microsoft's unbelievable clout, PHP is the most popular web programming language. Some reasons for its success are speed, increased security, and ease of programming. Once again in my opinion, whenever there is a real contest Microsoft comes up short. An ever-increasing number of computer specialists agree with me.

Perhaps you don't want to learn three or four products. (Who can blame you?) What you really would like to get the most out of an old computer that's collecting dust in the basement. Here Linux really wallops Windows as seen in our next article.