Guide to migrating from ASP to PHP

Guide to migrating from ASP to PHP.

This is a summary of the language differences between PHP, JScript and VBScript that I did to help my company learn the 3 server side scripting languages. I wrote this in 2000, but when porting it from php.weblogs.com, i went and updated it. To my surprise, this has been one of the most popular pages in the short time this blog has been up. I guess what Harry Fuecks wrote must have struck a chord. So I decided to write a new introduction too:

I started out as an ASP developer, and switched to PHP. My switch to PHP has been generally positive. Here are the nice things i found about PHP.

  • No need to purchase additional ActiveX controls for email, gif manipulation, pdf handling, etc. Batteries included.
  • Runs well on both IIS and Apache, Windows and Linux. Cross-platform power.
  • Good performance. PHP is faster than VBScript and JScript, based on the Bagley benchmarks.
  • Even if you are a VB programmer, provided you have some Javascript experience, you are already half-way up the learning curve, as PHP looks like Javascript with $ signs in front of variables.
  • For those of you who miss ADO (i did), there's ADOdb, a database abstraction library that works like ADO. And ASP2PHP is an automated VB to PHP converter.
  • I recommend this PHP installer for IIS (ok, ok, I admit wrote it). The default PHP installer at php.net is not tuned for high performance IIS usage – this one is.

[PHP Everywhere – Thoughts on PHP and other programming technologies by John Lim]

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