Blog status: activated!
Just in the nick of time too. Or is it? Doing a google search for "PHP vs .Net" brings up -- as result #1 -- an article from SitePoint discussing the merits of the technologies. From… 2002. The only blog that makes the Top 10 results bravely states that no one has any idea what they're talking about, followed by half a paragraph of useless blather and a recommendation for J2EE… from a post in 2003.
Is our debate irrelevant? Has it been beaten to death? I'd like to think that the answer to that question is irrelevant. It's still pretty frustrating trying to find a useful comparison with hard numbers. Oh, .Net has extreme cache control you say… but PHP on MySQL can be optimized for extreme database reads? So which one is better again? If it's been beaten to death, they hid the body pretty well. The point is, we STILL see people confused about these technologies, their differences, and needing a 2 paragraph summary to put in their technical feasibility report that's due on their bosses desk in 15 minutes.
PHP and ASP.Net are both great languages. Any developer worth their salt knows you choose the right tool for the job. But in our experience, most development shops are exclusively married to one technology for their web facing projects, and there's not a lot of professional development going on for people to learn both toolboxes. So long story short, the context of this blog is to compare and contrast PHP and .Net on projects that we're working on.
So with grand ceremony, we will start off the journey by documenting the project that birthed the idea of this blog. I'm beginning to rebuild a website that was started with PHP and then abandoned for a while. I'm building it in ASP.Net and trying to run it on an old honky clunker with CentOS4.4 and Mono 1.2.6. Incidentally, Mono is the technology that will make most of our experiments possible, and will probably have a strong focus here. We've got some great articles coming, including some sciencey type benchmarking tests, but in the meantime I'm still finalizing the blog layout and getting cool people to link to it. If you're cool, which seems likely, feel free!
Since all the heavy lifting of starting the blog is done, we'll be letting the dust settle for the next week or so, inviting the robots take a sniff around, and heading off to Maui for a week.
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Hows the conversion project going?