ASP does run on Linux: ChiliSoft! ASP, which used to be free. Now it costs about $350.
I used to swear by ASP. Since it's a Microsoft IIS product, you can write in either VBScript or JScript, because the real server code is in not in the language parser but in the COM objects your script manipulates to do its work. Unfortunately, that also means it's slow as hell compared to PHP, Perl, etc. But if you're at all familiar with VB you'll love ASP. Here's what ASP code looks like:
Code: Select all
<html>
<head>
<title>ASP Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<%
Dim i
For i = 0 To 10 Step 2
Response.Write "i = " & i & "<br>"
Next
%>
</body>
</html>
This code will print a list of numbers from 0 to 10, skipping all the odd numbers. It declares a variable i, loops from 0 to 10 counting by 2's, and every time it loops it calls the Write method of the Response object, passing it "i = whatever<br>", which is sent to your web browser as regular HTML. This object-oriented setup, however, is what causes ASP to be so slow.
PHP is pretty much the same. Here's how the same thing would be done in PHP:
Code: Select all
<html>
<head>
<title>ASP Demo</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
for($i = 0; $i <= 10; $i += 2)
echo "i=$i<br>";
?>
</body>
</html>
See how much smaller it is? PHP is much more efficient like that. ASP is simpler to understand for the beginner, unless you've had some experience with C and then PHP is a breeze. The blessing and curse of PHP is that it's not designed as modularly so it's not as slow, but also not as extensible (you usually compile PHP yourself, and at that time determine what features you want to add to or subtract from PHP).
Go with PHP. It's the most popular server-side scripting language on the web. I also prefer MySQL, but it doesn't have some of the advanced RDBMS features that other databases do (foreign keys, etc). Seeing as MySQL is supposed to one day compete with the likes of MS SQL Server and Oracle, that should change soon, and MySQL is excellent for most database work anyway.
