Hey thanks for checking out my question
I am trying to determine the best way to program my website...
I want my website to be a single page that has content changing in it (like ajax)
I want section updating every few minutes..
I will have a small box and a big box area of content.. if they click the small box I want it to trade its content to the big box and vice versa.. with the big box having addition content etc..
since I want it to be instant.. and it has complex algorithms to locate data in the database
any suggestions for the best languages to program it with?
ASP Forums
If you want to do freelance work PHP. ASP is probably better if you want to work some company as many of them are probably already using it.
Or, if possible you can learn both
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I'll suggest PHP, since its more flexible IMO.
PHP Is best for freelancing, ASP is best for integrating with corporate intranets and such, as many run on windows servers. ASP is pretty simple to learn
From what I'm told, ASP(.net) works better then PHP. It's downfall is the whole windows server thing. Mono runs it OK but not really well enough for a dedicated project.
I've worked with private government scripts with PHP, and ASP. ASP ones are usually more reilable, but the vairables are always less reliable. We had to run this one ASP program, securely. I needed IIS, MSSQL, and ASP. It was the biggest mess ever.
Not the script, but because each persons machine was setup slightly differently, it broke the whole thing. When we received the PHP version, we had zero problems after, but the program itself is bulkier now.
Both have their advantages. As Alex and Tom said, business wise ASP is used more, (As for some reason since it's made by MS people thing it's more reilable), so if you plan on coding for a career, ASP is a good move.
If you are planning to do more web based things for more personal or practical things, PHP is awesome.
I have no authority to say which is better, as I haven't learned the ASP language or read much about it to be honest. However, I will say that there are jobs available with companies for PHP developers just as well as there are for ASP developers. It just depends where you look.
I would go as far as to say you can do much more in ASP than PHP because ASP is also closely interweaved in the .NET framework. PHP can do almost everything, but in a much longer way. The .NET framework has thousands of sub routines per programmed into it, all of which can be called by ASP.
But PHP is a much wider used language across the Internet. As said, it is usually only corporate websites and intranets that use ASP. But as Imaad said, both offer career options
One page? A one-off thing? (You're going to write this once, and you're not interested in becoming a web developer?) The one you're best with. The page the user sees is HTML/CSS/Javascript, regardless of what language you use on the server to generate it. (You can use Cold Fusion too, if you have a CF server. That's easier to write in, only because what takes a few lines of code in other languages is a single statement in CF.)
Which is inherently better? The question is meaningless. It's the programmer who determines how well the site runs, not the language it's written in.
If the server you run on doesn't support ASP you have no choice. An Apache server can run either. Either can run with either database, MySQL or MSSQL (or Oracle, RDB, Access - you talk to the odbc driver if the language doesn't have direct hooks to the db).
So the bottom line is that it's your choice.