Recently, we have worked with clients who previously built their site on ASP, and we built their new site using PHP. To a large extent, use of ASP or PHP has been a developer’s preference. However, we choose PHP every time for several key reasons.
ASP stands for Active Server Pages, and the languages behind it include Visual Basic Script, JScript, and C#, among others and is used to create dynamic web pages. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Processor (a recursive acronym) and is an open source scripting language used to create dynamic web pages.
A simple answer to why we use PHP is because WordPress is built on PHP, and we love working with WordPress. But this fails to fully answer the question.
We believe that the future of software and web development is collaborative, social development stemming from open source environments. Historically, in contrast, development has been proprietary, with different corporations trying to push their particular methodology. But this doesn’t help innovation, and proves to hinder efficient development processes.
ASP is a child of Microsoft, and can only run on Microsoft servers without any additional software. It uses languages similar to what Microsoft programs are built on. The language’s copyright is owned by Microsoft, and the company is responsible for any development done within ASP.
PHP naturally lends itself to open source development because it is open source itself. Which is why WordPress is built on it. It’s why Drupal and Joomla are built on it.
So ASP and similar proprietary languages are a dying breed, much like the floundering corporations that own them. Open source technologies, like PHP, are lasting and more robust as larger communities work to extend the technologies further and further into the future. Farewell, Microsoft.