Neverside

The advancement of PHP..?

I know that ASP and its .NET series of programs (by Microsoft) has become quite a popular choice for the developers, not only that, it may seem to me that PHP are just simply the 'free-provider' and 'cross-platform' for the less majority of the market, whereas people would turn to PHP, only if they lack of the money, otherwise, they'd rather go with .NET choices.

I am not complaining about PHP, in fact, i'm a PHP programmer/developer myself (for about 2yrs), but I am wondering, if .NET has a wide array of programs to support its strecture; ASP, VB (now Visual Studio with .NET) which I overheard that its a wonderful and easy devlopment tool (drag and drop, not much programming involved, that's what i've heard); but the problem with it, is that, it isn't cross-platform compatible, in fact, it stays in the Windows environment (can't blame Bill Gates for that huh?), and not very friendly to other platforms, but granted, its powerful devlopment tools, and capable of programming some specific tools and able to connect to SQLServer database and pull out anything information it likes to, when programmed properly, ofcourse.

My question is that, how does PHP compare with that? Does PHP work with Oracle database? I've read an artcile before that PHP could connect with the MSSQL database, but how advanced programming does PHP takes it? what are some other tools/programs, to help PHP development, easier?

I've also read that, Sun, will be adapting, or rather, taking charge of PHP, later on, is there any truth to that?

What do you think, folks?

I know a few colleagues of mine has migrated from ASP to PHP as well, but we all agree that, since PHP is an OPENSOURCE language, it would, ofcourse, lack the support that it would have such as ASP from Microsoft, Open source community do offer, however, are the friendly community, and opinions/comments/feedbacks/little support that it does exist.

But without a doubt, PHP still lacks the tool(s) to make the development easier..... I remember there was a tool back then... errr.... somethingFast... grrr can't remember now...

For those of the professionals on this board, what else do you recommend of learning (such as C++, or VB, or anything else), to enrich your own value, and your COMPETITIVE EDGE?

........ But let's assume something else different, and let's have an overview about the programming community, of what's popular and what's not... and assuming you are a newbie to the programming community, what would you choose?

what's hot right now are the ASP.NET, PHP, and Java (and perhaps some WAP related)

what's not hot is Python, Cold fusion, and Delphi.

What are your opinion(s)?

ASP.net (only .net) is far, far superior to PHP in almost all things.

But heck, which one of us programs amazon backend or something... PHP is fine for my purposes, it is free, the servers are cheaper to rent etc.
It makes no difference to your customers, as long as they do not need a real fast application.

And, most programmers could not optimize a PHP code or MySQL Querys enough. If they did they probably wouldn't even need ASP.

Migrating from ASP.net to PHP, though, makes no sense to me.
I worked with both and ASP.net is definitly better.

I've done programming on both languages before too. I'd have to go with ASP.NET. I personally feel that the way of data representation is far much more easier and structured compared to PHP

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the tetra elemental