All three are server side technologies that allow you to add database applications and interactivity to your website. All three are used in web development. All three will have strong supporters  from the database programmers that settle on one of these programming languages to specialize in. PHP and ASP.NET are the two dominant technologies in use today.

PHP is the open source scripting language making it generally the lower cost solution. It is the most popular programming language in use today making it easier to find replacement programmers. PHP can be run on either a Linux or a Windows hosting environment, but runs faster on a Linux server because of the lower overhead. PHP is very powerful and makes use of C++ in its backend. It is very compact and well organized and works very well with MySQL. One major advantage is that all memory used by the script is managed automatically closing database links, freeing memory assigned to images, etc.

ASP.NET is the proprietary web application framework by Microsoft. Dot Net (ASP.NET) is the successor to the older ASP (Active Server Pages). It is based on the Visual Basic syntax. It is also very popular but tends to be a more expensive solution than PHP. ASP and ASP.NET work better on Microsoft windows servers. ASP works better with SQL Server and Access. ASP.NET is also fully object oriented (like PHP) and is a very easy way to make very powerful and scalable applications.

ColdFusion is the Macromedia scripting language. ColdFusion is not nearly as popular as PHP or ASP.NET making it  more difficult to move your website from one developer to another. Perhaps ColdFusion’s biggest problem is it’s high price tag. ColdFusion can be installed on Windows or Linux servers, but requires ColdFusion Server to be installed making your selection of hosting companies more limited. One of the biggest advantages of ColdFusion is the ease of producing dynamic websites.

All three technologies for creating dynamic websites have their strong supporters and all three can produce high quality database driven websites. We have settled on PHP database programming as our recommended solution.