Hi Albert,

It really depends on what you're after. PHP is very popular and for a good reason - it's simple and there's a lot of content and code out for it.

ASP.NET is also popular and for a good reason - it's very powerful and uses a very sophisticated and highly extensible and tweakable architecture. But it is more complex, if you want to get the most out of it. There's also lots of free stuff and documentation and community support for ASP.NET.

I'm certainly biased and I'm way sold on ASP.NET as the most powerful Web platform out there at the moment.

If you need to build simple applications something to look at too is Ruby on Rails which can spit out entire applications in almost no time at the expense of kind of a blah experience.

It all depends on what you're after and also what your background is. If you want to run on a Linux box, ASP.NET is probably not your first choice <g>(although it will run with Mono).

Compared to ASP.NET, PHP is like writing classic ASP spaghetti code, which is not something that I like to do. But there are plenty of people who like coding this way.

But often when PHP people like to point out how complex .NET is, those people forget that you can actually do that same kind of thing in .NET (ASP classic type 'procedural' scripting that is - everything in one page and not using server controls). The advantage of .NET is easily the breadth of the whole .NET framework behind it.

+++ Rick ---

>Hi Everyone,
>
>My sister who works for another company called to ask my opinion on something (being the big brother "in computers"). She says their company is contracting with some guy who is going to do an on-line survey which (I supposed) is going to be linked to some db in the background for later analysis. Their general site has been maintained by the owners son, young guy, and looks decent enough (small company) and he has used php for some stuff. The new guy (professional I think) wants to do it in .net So she asked my opinion - of which I have next to none...I said I would ask on my favourite site.
>
>a) any blazing advantages to one over the other?
>
>b) I asked her to ask if both can co-exist on the same server
>
>I have no idea if the server is a Win server or not - I don't even know if php is only for non-win servers
>
>Anything you can shed light on would help.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Albert Gostick