PHP ASP Robert Nelson Will Vanlue BA370 November 4th 2005 Server Side Processing SSP HTTP is a stateless protocol How do we overcome this With SSP Server Side Processing Definition Coding that is placed in served files and evaluated on the server while the files are being served to the client They let you add dynamically generated content to an existing file usually HTML pages With SSP we are able to remember previous activity from internet clients SSP has many other functions too Server Side Processing SSP Languages and technologies that allow for dynamic content in web pages Call allow for the inclusion of time connection geographic or browser dependent information Online shopping personalized content developing directories and other nonstatic applications require SSP Server Side Processing SSP Many technologies used to implement SSP ASP PHP JSP Coldfusion ASP NET Java Perl Python C etc Why PHP ASP Very widely used languages Both have relatively low learning curves Large support communities http www php net http msdn microsoft com Server Side Processing 4 Client 3 Interpreter PHP ASP Server 1 2 1 Client requests a page from the server 2 HTTP Server passes PHP ASP page to interpreter application 3 Interpreter parses code and returns it to HTTP server as HTML 4 Page is delivered back to client as HTML Other Requests servers database apps etc History of PHP PHP FI 1995 PHP FI 2 0 1997 Personal Home Page Forms Interpreter Created by Rasmus Lerdorf Sample set of Perl scripts to track online access to documents Relatively inconsistent syntax Lerdorf chose to publicly release the source code Cult like following of thousands of users Approximately 50 000 pages 1 of the internet report usage Spent most of it s life in beta PHP 3 0 1998 Recursive Acronym PHP Hypertext Preprocessor First version to resemble modern PHP Created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski with help from Lerdorf Name was changed to make it sound more useful for commercial usage Object oriented and very consistent syntax Tens of thousands of users Hundreds of thousands of pages 10 of the internet report usage History of PHP PHP 4 0 1999 New Zend Engine at the core Named after Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans Handled third party databases much more efficiently Improved portability with a wider variety of server compatibility Provides more secure transfers of information Hundreds of thousands of users Several millions of pages 20 of the internet report usage PHP 5 0 2004 Had several pre releases Zend Engine 2 0 Dozens of new features History of ASP Classic ASP ASP 1 0 1996 Supports interpreted VBScript and JScript ASP 2 0 1997 ASP 3 0 2000 ASP NET ASP NET 1 0 2002 Can replace HTML scripting with full support for NET languages In page scripts are still supported VB NET and C classes can generate pages ASP NET 2 0 2005 Scheduled release of November 7th Easier to use drag and drop interface PHP Features Source code is not sent to the browser Code is bracketed by and Can be inserted into HTML code or can be a stand alone application File extension needs to be php php3 php4 etc Server must have PHP interpreter installed Supports database control Source code is OPEN ASP Features Source code is not sent to the browser Code is bracketed by and Can be inserted into HTML code or can be a stand alone application Supports a wide variety of NET languages Server must have ASP NET installed Supports database control but may need third party drivers Source code is CLOSED Code Demos Demo 1 Simple Password Generator PHP Code ASP Code Output Demo 2 Sessions Cookies PHP Code ASP Code Output Demo 3 Database Connectivity PHP Code ASP Code Output Comparison of ASP Pros Professional tech support Versions are documented at msdn microsoft com Run on many company intranets Has a familiar Microsoft environment Widely available Cons Only practical to run on a Windows server Support can be expensive Comparison of PHP Pros Open source Freely available Very portable Active user community Uses relatively little processor power Cons More CPU intensive on a large scale Extensibility is relatively limited ASP vs PHP ASP VBScript JavaScript Languages C etc Platforms Windows others can be used but third party software is needed PHP PHP Any platform for which the source code is available Portability Poor Excellent Scalability Good Poor Source Code Closed Learning Curve Low Open Medium Questions References Wikipedia org http en wikipedia org wiki Active Server Pages Glasshaus com http www glasshaus com samplechapters 1086 chap ter8 asp Php net http www php net history Apache org http httpd apache org docs 1 3 howto ssi html