O'Reilly Network: PHP vs. ASP

Published on O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/asp_php.html
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Date: Jan 20 2000
From: Bill Burris
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: PHP vs. ASP

In the past you have written about how Microsoft used unfair practices to enable IIS to gain an advantage over Apache. The Open Source community would be better served if you spent your time on technical comparison of products.

I think that Active Server Pages and Component Services (formally MTS) has made it much easier to produce e-commerce and intranet sites.

I would like to see a comparison of PHP and ASP. A casual look at some PHP sites, has led me to believe that PHP will effectivly replace the server side scripting aspects of ASP.

It looks like PHP also has very good support for using databases. Microsoft Component Services is designed to achive scalability through resource pooling as well as provide transaction processing. What technologies are available for use with PHP & Apache for addressing these issues?

In my own work I use ASP to access my windows application and NT Services via COM. PHP running on Windows most likely will have this same capability. Now if I was using PHP & Apache with Linux, what capablity is there for communicating with other processes, such as a deamon.

Hopfully you will have more PHP titles in the near future. Both for Windows and Linux environments.

Thanks,

Bill

Bill,

You wrote: In the past you have written about how Microsoft used unfair practices to enable IIS to gain an advantage over Apache. The Open Source community would be better served if you spent your time on technical comparison of products.

Actually, that's not what I said. I said that Microsoft had used unfair practices to gain an advantage over NT-based Web server products from Netscape and O'Reilly. That's all distant history now, but for the record, here are the facts:

O'Reilly actually developed and sold the first Web server for Windows back in 1995--WebSite, by Bob Denny, a follow on to his original freeware httpd for windows. We did so because we felt that the Web was in danger of becoming a one-way medium. Ninety percent of the Web browsers were on Windows, but there were no Windows Web servers. Before long, there was a thriving market of Windows based Web servers.

Then, Microsoft introduced IIS, which was bundled with NT Server. In 1996, Netscape ran a series of ads pointing out that Microsoft's NT Workstation + Netscape's Web server was still cheaper than the "free" IIS/NT Server bundle.

Microsoft responded, in NT Workstation 4.0, by crippling the TCP/IP stack, so that you couldn't make more than 10 simultaneous TCP/IP connections. O'Reilly led a net protest at this corruption of what up to then had been an industry-standard protocol. Microsoft quickly backed down, and restored a fully functional TCP/IP to NT Workstation, but they kept the 10-connection limit in their NT Workstation license agreement. This definitely had a chilling effect on the sales of competing products, and led to a lot of scorn from the net community. After all, saying that an operating system license can be used to prohibit using a standard protocol to its full capacity, with the argument that the TCP/IP stack is subject to MS license, is a bit like saying that MS has the ability to restrict the size of documents that competing word processors can write--the disk write routines are part of their operating system as well.

Microsoft claimed that this was all done for the benefit of their users, insisting that NT Workstation wasn't up to the task of running a Web server. O'Reilly editor Andrew Schulman and developer Mark Russunovich then demonstrated that it was possible to turn NT Workstation into NT Server by changing only a couple of Registry entries. Some historical documents relating to this controversy (albeit with a bunch of broken hyperlinks) can be seen at the following URLs:

ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/windows/win95.update/ntwks4.html
ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/windows/win95.update/ntwk4.html
ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/windows/win95.update/ntnodiff.html

You might also be thinking about my November piece in Salon comparing the Apache Group's defense of Web standards to the Battle of Britain in WWII.

The point of that article was not that Microsoft had put the squeeze on Apache, but rather, given their history of putting the squeeze on Netscape, we should be very grateful that Apache is there as a reference implementation for the Web standards. That's what's keeping them from being a Microsoft preserve, with all that seems to entail.

You wrote: I think that Active Server Pages and Component Services (formally MTS) has made it much easier to produce e-commerce and intranet sites.
I would like to see a comparison of PHP and ASP. A casual look at some PHP sites, has led me to believe that PHP will effectivly replace the server side scripting aspects of ASP.
It looks like PHP also has very good support for using databases. Microsoft Component Services is designed to achive scalability through resource pooling as well as provide transaction processing. What technologies are available for use with PHP & Apache for addressing these issues?
In my own work I use ASP to access my windows application and NT Services via COM. PHP running on Windows most likely will have this same capability. Now if I was using PHP & Apache with Linux, what capablity is there for communicating with other processes, such as a deamon.
Hopfully you will have more PHP titles in the near future. Both for Windows and Linux environments.

I agree very much that PHP is a great advance in Web functionality, on both Apache and on Windows Web servers. We will indeed have more books on it, and Rasmus' time permitting, sooner rather than later.

--Tim