ASP.NET or PHP?

[callmedan]

I'm about learning web programming next semester and I'm surprised that there's only ASP.NET in the curriculum of my university. And it seems PHP is more popular. I'd like to ask which one is better, can anyone here let me know?

 

[Kyo Panda]

Both are good to a point that, whichever you choose, you'll probably find demand for it. Being that said, begin with ASP.NET as your university is asking for it, and postpone the learning of PHP. But if you're planning on following the web developer carreer, at some point you'll have to learn not only PHP, but Java, Node and Ruby too.

 

[callmedan]

Oh, thank you @Kyo Panda ! Nice to know that.

 

[Rukiri]

asp.net is actually pretty cool, always been a ruby/rails guy but you'll have to eventually pick an area where you think the most money is headed.

 

[ChampX]

I haven't done a huge ton of web development, but I'll share what I know.

ASP.NET and everything else under the .NET umbrella (SharePoint, MVC, SQL Server, etc with C# as an exception) is locked into the Windows domain which means your server will have to be running Windows. Many servers however are usually under a Linux distro (CentOS or RedHat mostly) because of stability, security, and mostly no cost, which then means you're going to be using PHP most likely. That being said, there is a great demand in the enterprise space for being a .NET full stack developer and there is also value in your desk work space matching the server work space allowing for an easier development pipeline, especially for QA. Developing on Windows locally and uploading to a Linux server can have some headaches due to differentiating file structures so most developers usually have their local work space on the same OS as the server. There's nothing wrong with the ASP.NET approach, but you will be locked to certain platforms and companies specifically running as a "Microsoft Shop" where learning PHP and anything else under the LAMP umbrella (Linux, Apache, MySQL (also MongoDB ), and PHP (also Perl or Python)) will generally give you more opportunities and can run on any platform. A startup is more likely to go the LAMP route unlike an enterprise.

You could always learn everything, but we rarely have time for that so it just depends on what kind of opportunities you want.

 

[Rukiri]

@ChampX: You don't need a Windows server to run ASP.Net anymore thanks to .Net Core!

Now unless you're using forum software which is likely IP.Boards, Xenforo, PHPBB, etc you're probably going to want to use PHP but it's not hard working on a single sign on script as I personally found it easier to use asp.net over something like rails when using forum software and most of the ruby forum scripts are meh...

 

[Zeriab]

The MEAN stack seems to gain quite a lot of popularity lately, and I personally find it much more interesting than the LAMP stack.
Since you are here on this forum you'll have an easier time translating the programming knowledge considering MEAN is JavaScript based.

ASP.NET seems to have some advantage if your website happens to be heavily depended on transactions and the guarantees they can give. Though really, ASP.NET, LAMP or MEAN. Either framework/technology stack is fine for the purpose of learning.

P.s.to add to Rukiri's post here is one documentation for porting ASP.NET Applications to UNIX based operation systems: https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/asp-net-or-php.84194/#post-777779

*hugs*
- Zeriab

 

[ChampX]

I have the most experience with LAMP stacks from personal use, but I have worked in a company that uses ASP.NET server side (I was not apart of that team). I will have to research .NET Core and MEAN stacks more because now my interest is piqued. I do think LAMP stacks are the easiest to setup, though I'm sure I could be told otherwise as I haven't used a MEAN stack before.

@Zeriab is your documentation meant to link to my earlier post?

 

[Zeriab]

No it was not -_-
Here's the link: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/web/porting-aspnet-applications/

 

[ChampX]

So looking into this a little bit, it seems ASP.NET has the same problem C# has outside Windows operating systems where the framework is just not as up to date. ASP.NET in particular can't use a framework higher than 2.0 on Linux, which is over 10 years old, when the current version of ASP.NET is 4.6 and has more niceties and bells and whistles to it. I haven't really used ASP.NET myself, but I do appreciate some of the niceties newer versions of C# bring like when C# 6.0 brought us null conditional and null coalescing operators (?., ?[], ??) that I wouldn't be able to use in C# on a Unix-based system.

 

[Rukiri]

Because asp.net 5 is dead, you should be using asp.net core 2.0
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/getting-started

Ubuntu and CentOS should be the most up to date "minus arch Linux for obvious reasons"