Final Thoughts

Web development is an exciting way to painlessly deliver information to users of many operating systems. Historically, browser compatibility was a major headache . But today the major web browsers interoperate very well when designers avoid the use of proprietary plug-ins. The real challenges come on the server side. While static web content is relatively easy to move from Windows to Linux or vice versa, dynamic web content is another story.

PHP pages and Active Server Pages are typically written with a particular operating system in mind. But in this chapter, we've shown how to get PHP working on Windows. And we've also shown how to get ASP working on Linux, both with the cutting-edge Mono ASP.NET environment and with Sun's JASP environment.

PHP running on Windows is a reasonable alternative to PHP running on Linux. Mono's ASP.NET environment is an increasingly viable alternative to ASP.NET running on Windows, though third-party ASP.NET applications are unlikely to work without some cooperation on the part of the vendor. And Sun's JASP provides an immediately practical alternative for those who need to host traditional Active Server Pages and applications on Linux today.