php or asp?

[thekemp]

im doing a small project for my degree course , a webform that relys on information from a database to make decisions based on what the user inputs,
this is all pretty new to me as it involves a database, i have access to both iss server oracle database and a cgi-bin so just wondering from you guys which is the best way to go about this?

thansk for any input!

[James T]

There are quite a lot of php examples floating around the web, php has oracle functions (never used them). I have used php with mysql in a similar application. One of the main tricks is to make sure you handle the sessions correctly, php will open a database connection once and reuse during the session. I made a slight mistake with doing sessions totally myself, using a session id that wasn't unique , using time as a seed into random was a bad choice.

You could also think about javascript to create your pages based on xml presentation of the data from the database up to the web client. This facility is quite nice.

Nice thing is it can all fit under the one php umbrella. However, more recently I've been moving towards mod_perl. Some would call this a backward step .

[omalleytrading]

The right answer is probably based on this question:

What's installed on your web server?

I use both ASP and PHP for my job, and I can't say that one is absolutely better than the other. ASP is better than PHP at some things, and PHP is better than ASP for others. Ultimately, you can do the same thing with either, so it boils down to personaly preference or availability. Since you have no preset personal preference, make your choice based on what's installed on your web server.

[thekemp]

i have 2 local webservers an apache with all mods installed and an iss server running on server 2003 availible for my use, i want to learn one or the other im leaning towards asp/access/vbscripting as i have a vb bakground already and i dont really want to start learning perl as i only have 4 weeks to complete this project.

anyone recomend any good sites for asp ?

thanks

[Tekk]

www.4guysfromrolla.com
www.asp101.com
www.w3schools.com (for beginner purposes)

[omalleytrading]

Another good one is:

www.aspfaq.com