Hello.
I'm new web designer, and I'm set out to design a community website. I want to design a website for my friends to meet up on the internet. I'm good at HTML, Flash, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I've enrolled for a courses on a few other programming languages, both web-enabled and otherwise. I'll soon be mastering C, C++, Java, JS, ASP, PHP and a few other things. Since I plan to build a community site, I guess it'll be a dynamic website, and hence, I may need to be good at dyanmic website design. Also, I may need my website to exchange information and interact with the databases.
I've heard that my two best options are ASP and PHP. I've been told that ASP (Active Server Pages) is developed and marketed by Microsoft and it runs on Microsoft servers only, with the help of IIS (Internet Information Server), while PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is being developed by a developers' community (
www.php.net) and runs on Unix and Linux servers, and some versions of it also run on Windows NT servers. I've also been told by my college programming lecturers that the main difference between the two lie on factors like Cost, Speed, Platform Compatibility, Database Connectivity, Base Language, etc. Coming to the database aspects, PHP is also believed to be very flexbile as it can be connected with various databases. Besides, PHP is open-source and runs primarily on Linux, which is free.
However, I researched on the net, and read in a few websites that development time is very less in ASP.net and it can save a lot of time, as compared to developing with PHP. I'm perplexed. Please suggest a few important factors I should consider before starting, both from users' end and my (developers') end.
What should I pick? PHP or ASP?
