Computer programming is a pretty common aspect in this age of digital technology and as such, there are hundreds of powerful programming languages existing today. PHP is one of the most common programming languages in the software industry throughout the world. Initially, the abbreviation stood for Personal Home Page; although, now because of its rich set of added features, it has changed to Hypertext Preprocessor.

PHP: Major Features

- It is server-side scripting language
- It is mainly used for web development
- Although, it can be used as common programming language, just like C
- PHP syntaxes can be straightaway combined with HTML coding and generate webpages
- A web server having a PHP processor module interprets PHP codes and finally, the resultant webpage is generated
- It is an open source software and can be procured for free

ASP: An introduction

- ASP is the acronym for Active Server Pages and is also often referred to as ASP Classic or, Classic ASP
- It was introduced by Microsoft in 1996 as the first server-site script engine for dynamically generating webpages

Now, since both these applications serve the same purpose of generating webpages, there is a break-neck competition between the two in the world of web development. Both the elements are robust and dependable and are adored by hundreds and thousands of developers across the world. However, both ASP and PHP have their own set of advantages and disadvantages.

PHP and ASP Web Development: The Contrast

- As mentioned earlier, PHP is open source and comes free of cost. ASP is a Microsoft product and it comes for free too. However, one has to pay for the Windows OS, by default, in order to get access to ASP application.
- Apache server and Linux Operating System (OS) that are necessary to run PHP on a machine are also open source elements.
- Both these applications can be written and compiled in Notepad, but there are specific platforms for these applications. Visual Studio is the most preferred platform for running ASP, whereas, Zend Studio is most popular for PHP.
- PHP being an open source product lacks adequate customer support
- Moreover, security updates for PHP are pretty poor, if not irregular alone
- ASP scores over the other in these respects as, Microsoft allocates a generous share of its resources to these aspects. However, online community support for PHP is readily available and is indeed very helpful.
- PHP website development services often stumble upon another inconvenience. ASP supports multiple programming languages, including VB.NET, JScript and C#, etc. PHP does not offer this facility, although, at present it has come up a long way with the latest version of PHP 5.x
- The database at the backend is a vital determinant in choosing a particular platform in many cases. According to convention, PHP supports MySQL, whereas ASP uses MSSQL, another product from Microsoft.

Users choose any of these applications according to their convenience. As such, numbers of users for each of these products are simply countless. More user-friendly and sophisticated features are adding up to these software applications with the flow of time.

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