When it comes to Web development these days, you have a lot of options. Many of these methods involve preprocessing-that is, embedding code into HTML pages with special tags that signal to a preprocessor that they contain code, and that it should do something with it. Much like a CGI, this code is then run on the server, and it returns some content, which then assumes part of the shape of the resulting HTML page sent back to the browser. Both the open source scripting language PHP and languages within Microsoft's ASP.NET framework fall into this category; JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Perl/Mason operate this way as well.

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's scripting technology for displaying dynamic web pages, ASP programmes mostly use VBScript, JScript.

PHP is the open source alternative to ASP that runs on multiple operating systems, incuding Linux, Windows, Solaris and other OS.

Speed

PHP is relatively much more faster and stable than ASP, ASP is built on a COM-based architecture so when ever a program tries to connect to a database or he calls a COM object there is an overhead on the server, all this COM overhead adds up and slows things down.
Under PHP, everything runs in PHP's memory space. This means that PHP code will run faster because there is no overhead of communicating with different COM objects in different processes.
Again ASP is slower and more memory intensive applications than PHP's model because each ASP language compiler runs in its own process.

Price

PHP installtions are definetly cheaper to install, PHP runs great on Linux which is free, on the other hand ASP runs on the IIS Server (Internet Information Server) which need's Windows N.T/2000/2003 Servers.

Apart from that ASP mostly uses MS-SQL Server as the back end which again is expensive, where as PHP programmes mostly use MySQL which is again FREE!

Cross Platform compatablily

As stated earlier PHP programms run on Unix, Linux, Solaris and Window's with ASP you are mostly stuck with Windows.The big disadvantage to PHP and any open source software is that companies do not want it. They do not trust it.

No hidden code with ASP if you need to upload files, then you would
need a third party component like ASPuplod, similarly if you need to
send mail you need another component and so on.

In PHP common
tasks like ftp, encrypt passwords in MD5, or send email from a web page
all are built in hidden code, and as PHP is Open source there is a lot
of free code available for PHP.

This article just tries to differentiate between ASP and PHP.
We think ASP is a good and useful technology, but in the long run PHP is better.

written by Alex R.