How Does PHP Development Differ from Developing in ASP or ColdFusion?

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The most important distinction between PHP and ASP or ColdFusion is that it's free and open ; both ASP and ColdFusion are commercial and closed products. Experienced PHP developers often look at PHP's source code to figure out what is going on when the going gets tough.

ASP is freely available with the Windows NT Option Pack and is a part of the Windows 2000 operating system, and it runs only on Microsoft web servers. For other web servers, you must purchase third-party commercial implementations .ASP can use any COM-compliant language, such as VBScript and JScript.

ColdFusion is available for other web servers (and other platforms, such as Windows and Linux) and has a free version available. However, most of the features you would want to use (such as accessing databases) are included only on the commercial version. ColdFusion differs quite a lot from PHP and ASP in that it uses a markup-like syntax called CFML. PHP and ASP use a more conventional programming-language-like syntax.

Interestingly, ColdFusion was developed much like PHP. In 1994, web developer Jeremy Allaire was using Perl and CGI for his web applications but saw the need for an easier way to do things. He joined forces with his brother, and they created ColdFusion.

At the time ColdFusion was released, another company called Aspect Software created a product called Hot Lava that was similar to ColdFusion but that used the Visual Basic scripting language as its programming language. Microsoft bought the company in early 1996 and later that year released Active Server Pages (ASP) as part of Internet Information Server (IIS) 3.0.

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