Php and Asp?

You may hear the terms ASP and PHP and not really understand what they are. Well basically they are 'server side languages'. What this means is they are programming language which tell the webserver to do things. This could be to send an email, or tell the time or even to store data into a database. If you want your website to do anything other than just show pages to your customers your programmer is likely to be using one of these languages.

When telling people I am programming their website in PHP they are often confused as they thought all pages were programmed in Html. The truth is they are. The PHP or ASP never actually gets sent to your customers. PHP and ASP and mixed with HTML, the HTML gets sent to your customers and all the other info get intercepted by the server. The server then does what you ask and often uses the PHP / ASP to change the HTML. This allows programmers to do simple things like adding todays date to your webpage, automatically updating every day, or more complex things like tracking your users around your website and recording it all into a database.

The main difference between ASP and PHP is the former is usually used on Microsoft and the latter is usually used on Apache/Linux. ASP is also owned by Microsoft so you have to pay to use it, PHP is opensource so it is free. Both ASP and PHP can be used on Windows or Linux but this is relatively rare, despite there being few reasons why. I in the past have used ASP on Linux, Chillisoft used to do a version of ASP specifically for Linux - this is now run by Sun Microsystems . I quickly moved on to PHP because everytime you want added functionality with ASP you seem to have to pay more. With PHP you can usually get a free patch which allows it to almost anything you or your programmer would want.