1: PHP (Hypertext Pre-processor) PHP is an open source server side scripting language that mainly used for developing

web applications and web services. Advantages: 1. Open source 2. Simple and very easy to learn. 3. Support for both structural programming and Object Oriented Programming. Use of variable variables $$var. 4. PHP can be used on all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, RISC OS, and probably others. PHP has also support for most of the web servers today. This includes Apache, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Personal Web Server, Netscape and iPlanet servers, Oreilly Website Pro server, Caudium, Xitami, OmniHTTPd, and many others. For the majority of the servers PHP has a module, for the others supporting the CGI standard, PHP can work as a CGI processor. 5. One of the most Sexiest feature of PHP is that it can plugin with most of the databases. It support with Adabas D, dBase, Empress, FilePro (read-only), Hyperwave, IBM DB2, Informix, Ingres, InterBase, rontBase, mSQL, Direct MS-SQL, MySQL, ODBC, Oracle (OCI7 and OCI8), Ovrimos, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Solid Sybase, Velocis and Unix dbm 6. Power ful built in functions. click here to see all php functions 7. PHP also has support services using protocols such as LDAP, IMAP, SNMP, NNTP, POP3, HTTP, COM (on Windows) 8. PHP has extremely useful text processing features, from the POSIX Extended or Perl regular expressions to parsing XML documents. For parsing and accessing XML documents, PHP 5 standardizes all the XML extensions on the solid base of libxml2 and extends the feature set adding SimpleXML and XMLReader support. 9. Easy deployment and cost effective hosting.

Disadvantages: 1. Security flaws due to unknown vulnerabilities. 2. Not good to create desktop Applications 2: ASP ASP is a server side script and it can perform many backend processing jobs for a web site, same way it can't do many things particularly the client end operations as it has no control over the client end events or user controls. So there are many advantages and disadvantages of using ASP to manage web pages. Advantages of ASP Performance: ASP.NET improves performance by utilizing the strengths of JIT compilation, automatic resource optimization, runtime profiling, automatic memory management, early binding, better caching and exception handling. Inbuilt data caching module: ASP.NET has a data caching module to decide on which data on the ASP page should be cached and when to empty this cache and when to re-query. Support for Tools: With ASP you can drag and drop your web controls just like how it is done in Visual Basic controls. All you have to do is just double click to write a server program for the control. Ease of Use: ASP pages are just HTML pages with ASP programs encapsulated between <% and %> tags. To run an asp file you just have to place it into a directory in your server and run it provide you have proper authorization. All you have to do to make some changes is just edit your asp file and the modification will be executed. Flexibility: With ASP you can code your scripts in both VBScript and Microsoft Jscript. There are also existing modules to support languages like Python, perl along with solutions to incorporate other languages. So even if you are new to ASP you can use your previous knowledge in other programming languages like VB and JavaScript while migrating to ASP. This makes it easier to learn ASP even with just html knowledge.

Disadvantages of ASP Higher costs: To process asp pages you need to install IIS on a Windows platform server. You have to buy MS-SQL to connect to your database in ASP. And you need to add some components as there are no inbuilt features like in PHP. All these activities will cost you money. Lower Speed: ASP is slower than PHP, as it is based on COM architecture that is actually an overhead to the server. Not Platform Compatible: ASP does not have platform compatibility like PHP. This is because it is mostly dependent on Microsoft products and needs a Windows platform along with an ASP-Apache installation at the server side. Needs VB knowledge: The syntax of ASP has a lot of similarity with that of Visual Basic. Hence some VB knowledge is needed to program is ASP.