Why is ASP more expensive than PHP?

It's typical for .NET web programmers to use code behind. I am using java comparisons because besides being a PHP programmer I am a Java programmer. I have used .NET in the past, and I see no advantage to using it over Java with Tomcat or Websphere.

Java is the original, and .NET is the clone.

It is really hard to compare .NET to PHP, so I am using Java for the comparison.

Say you are using Resin and you are running Java and PHP using using data marshalling between the 2(Quercus Java based PHP compiler). You would quickly realize that it is more convenient to edit and use the PHP to write web logic than to use web.xml and Java servlets.

People are so desperate to use PHP with Google App Engine that they have ported the entire Caucho Quercus PHP interpreter written in Java to Google App Engine, just so they can use PHP on Google's platform.

Plus .NET and visual studio costs money. I had let my own MSDN Professional license expire for almost 2 years before I bought a renewal, and I only purchased it because somebody had an unopened MSDN Professional 2003 renewal on ebay for $400 so I used cashback to get it for $368 w/shipping and tax included. I still have to activate it and I hope they don't give me problems about it being 2003.

That being said I almost never use MSDN, except on very rare occasions when somebody needs something on Windows. That's why aside from a cheap deal on eBay, it's not really worth paying for.

The point is that most people don't want the added cost of licensing. Especially not when Java offers the same platform for free with the Apache Foundation Web services. If you want slow .jsp's and servlets, at least you can have them for free with Resin or Tomcat and Eclipse.

"MySQL is fast, free, and works. IMO, it's very rare to see a database that can match even one of those things, let alone two."

I agree completely.

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.cache.backends.html

ZF, which most enterprise PHP MVC apps are coded on, can use a variety of different CPU saving mechanisms. Not the least of which is memcached. When you run cached pages, it really isn't very hard on the CPU.

You can clearly see the effects of using memcached with ZF when you run Apache Benchmarking tool against pages not using ZF caching and those that are. A page using Zend Framework MVC and memcached for pages hardly use any system resources. Again the benchmarking suite for Apache is free, so you can use that to test.

Memcached, is a free web server for caching data(PHP output buffered HTML pages, SQL results as serialized arrays) that can either run on the localhost or a remote host. It is used by Live Journal and other large social networks as an optimization solution.

As Steve Souders notes in his 2 books, high performance websites and even faster websites, most perceived delay on web pages is not due to server side performance, but due to a lack of optimization of the way content loads.

So make sure you use max-age and CSS sprites instead of individual images, because that is the true key to optimization and end user speed. Improving the server side HTML page output will only give you 15% improvement. Steve proved it when he did benchmarks at  Yahoo!. Anybody telling you anything else is a liar.

I would argue that you are incorrect. Zend Framework is a fully featured MVC framework with contributions by Google, Youtube, Adobe and other large companies. You can build enterprise applications based on ZF as you can code a single page in 2 minutes with PHP.

XDebug is also probably the best debugger known for rapid and inexpensive web development. It is even used by IBM.

These factors combined with the fact that licensing these platforms for as many clusters as you wish for commercial deployment, or even on a hosted cluster for commercial deployments such as Amazon's EC2 and S3 is perfectly free, as is the defacto SQL solution MySQL, and MySQL cluster for large DBA run data solutions.

"The only purpose these "enterprise" DBs serve is to keep the obsolete DBA employed"

How is that so?

How is a tech firm going to need a DBA any less if they are running a MySQL cluster vs. an Oracle cluster?

There are tons of MySQL DBAs out there. Sun has an entire conference dedicated to being a MySQL DBA.

Imagine if sites hampered by the slashdot effect only had to serve their assets out once with far future max-age or expires headers to prevent subsequent document modified TCP transactions, then only memcached HTML with PHP ?

What if all images on each page were only 1 optimized JPG and shown with CSS overflow: hidden rectanges(sprites)?

One shared hosted website could have a similar performance to one on a CDN or App Engine or something.

Most people have no idea how to do this, and only now have we seen investment dollars into automated systems that do this automatically (blackbox style). There is one from Israel and another few in the USA. They are still in beta, but close to release.

This is hidden by companies like Microsoft because they want to sell virtualization and clustered computing as the answer (Azure, ect..) when it really doesn't address the problem at all that a common CDN or other solution couldn't address.

Scripts must be placed at the very bottom of the DOM.

Like I said about 100M world wide was pumped into startups that aimed at creating an automated optimization solution. Some of those resources are going to my project because it is related.

One thing that can be said is that for those with a corporate budget, the choice does not come down to the cost of licensing. Supprot licensing has to be purchased even for a Linux based solution by way of contractual obligations. Zend sells it, Red Hat sells it and so do other LAMP toolchain vendors. MySQL ect... are included in that.

So it comes down to the preference of the senior developers. I know that the person who posted the original question is not in an enterprise budget scale situation, so in his or her case, it may simply come down to a question of cost.

If you look at the Channel9 source HTML you will see that the developers are not using the recommended techniques at all.

The webtrends2.js script is at the top of the page, making page load time slow. It should be at the bottom.

Look at the names of these divs: id=ctl00_MainPlaceHolder_EntryList_TopPager_LastButton_ButtonHyperLink

These are sloppy, unintuitive and do not conform to a naming convention of any kind.

The page CSS is sloppy and disorganized, even when minified, which really says something:

http://channel9.msdn.com/20091108022630/styles.css

They are using JQuery instead of a Microsoft JScript library. What happend to Atlas? This is an admission of failure.

OK, next let's visit the JS at the end of the page starting with:

Sys.Application.add_init(function() {
    $create(Channel9.Web.UI.Lightbox

Again, this is sloppy and malformed. This should be clean and make better use of OO. This is what looks like a DOM element loader, but is badly implemented. It should also be minified as right now it is a complete waste of load space.

Images:

You have to download a million tiny table cell background images like:

http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/Dev/App_Themes/C9/images/button01-center.gif

Instead of one big image with overflow: hidden CSS sprites.

If-Modified:

The max-age and expires headers are not set at all. Your browser has to query the C9 asset server over and over again for each and every page load to grab the last modified time.

If I was doing an SEO audit of this website I would give it a F for fail. Also the meta information is not optimized properly.

The robots.txt only contains the sitemap: http://channel9.msdn.com/robots.txt

The site map is missing meta information: http://channel9.msdn.com/sitemapindex.ashx and is sereverly outdated.

If MS developers can't use recommended techniques, then how can you expect those using their technology to. They make the HTML GUI design products.

I would say that this website was made by amateurs, which is not uncommon for ASPX devs.

NDA my friend. Maybe in another life. I will be at Google I/O and Scale 8X again this year. Let me know if you're going and I can meet up and say hi.