I have been developing pages for a while now and am just getting to learn how to do it dynamically. i wanted your opinions as to which server technology i should be learning. I have always used asp pages before but that was as i got someone else to do the scripting. Any advice on which is best / easiest to learn would be appreciated

Hi Matt,

If you had asked this question a couple of years ago I would have recommended ASP. This was mainly due to the hugh wealth of resource and information available to help you on you way learning the basics and onto advanced stuff.

But to be honest, today there is just as much out there to help you with PHP as there is with ASP. There is not very easy to say which is better or easier, they are just two coding languages capable of acheiving much the same.

My personal choice has been ASP, as the syntax seems simple to me and I have always been in the Microsoft VBScript environment. I have had very little contact with PHP but please do not take it that I am saying asp is better, I would not want to judge between the two.

If you site is in asp (or someone has coded it that way for you) I suggest that maybe u continue with that as you will have some good examples of what to do from him.

Either way, use the Dreamweaver tutorials to get you started as there is no better way than that...

Hope this helps.

Regards

Vince Baker
<strong>DMX Zone Manager</strong>

[VBScript | ASP | HTML | CSS | SQL | Oracle | AS400 | ERP Logic | Hosting]

Thanks Vince thats great

1 other thought - is there any advantage of using coldfusion. i was wondering as it is developed by macromedia whether it integrates better with DW

Hi Matt,

Never used it myself but I would imagine it is well integrated.....I have always gone for the following:

MS ACCESS ( Small or personal sites)
MY SQL (Medium or low cost sites)
MS SQL SERVER (Large or higher cost sites)

The basic syntax for these is the same as each other with just the occasional difference.
Obviously Access (if you already have it) or MY SQL (Free to download) will cost you nothing and you will be able to get a lot of support from this site on those.

Not sure about Coldfusion....maybe someone else can comment on the easy/quality of use for Coldfusion?

Regards

Vince Baker
<strong>DMX Zone Manager</strong>

[VBScript | ASP | HTML | CSS | SQL | Oracle | AS400 | ERP Logic | Hosting]

Thankyou Vince

I'll think i'll stick to ASP for now

cheers matt

<b>Coldfusion</b> is great on its own guard, but is more costly since it's another layer added to the server. CF (ColdFusion) MX7 just came out and has cool stuff like Flash form rendering and SMS text messaging gateways... but costs $1,200-6,000. Integration with DW is really awesome, but you can do pratically most the same in PHP/ASP/.NET/JSP, etc.

<b>PHP</b> is free and runs on all platforms, mainly on Linux servers. PHP/MySQL are a wonderful combo, since both are free and fast and popular. I currently use PHP myself.

<b>ASP</b> runs on ISS (Windows servers), so it's not technically free since Windows hosting usually is a few more dollars than Linux hosting packages. ASP is poweful too, but I think PHP has more functions to do more routine stuff, but ASP has a lot that I might not know all about.


Hope those help too.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Chris Charlton <i>- DMXzone Manager</i>
<font size=1>[ Studio MX/MX2004 | PHP/ASP | SQL | XHTML/CSS | XML | Actionscript | Web Accessibility | MX Extensibility ]</font id=size1>

Thanks Chris

Coldfusion sounds good as i have a site coming up where i want to create PDf's from dynamic pages. Is cf the only way to go to achieve this.
Also how do you test locally when developing. I would be buying shared hosting space with CF but wouldn't want to buy CF to test locally. Would i have to upload all the time to test development.
I assume there is less support around for CF aswell?

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>Coldfusion sounds good as i have a site coming up where i want to create PDf's from dynamic pages. Is cf the only way to go to achieve this.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>
No, there are ASP & PHP ways, infact our <b>DMXzone Premium Article PHP/MySQL section has a 3-part series on generating PDFs via PHP</b>.

I'm sure there's an ASP solution, I just don't know of it right offhand.

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>Also how do you test locally when developing. I would be buying shared hosting space with CF but wouldn't want to buy CF to test locally. Would i have to upload all the time to test development.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>
There's a free version for developing, I'm fairly sure... otherwise, yes, you'll have to upload each time to test. <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile_tongue.gif border=0 align=middle>

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>I assume there is less support around for CF aswell?<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>
Your assuming wrong; Macromedia has a whole DevNet center for CF, adn we have a few articles here for CF. <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Chris Charlton <i>- DMXzone Manager</i>
<font size=1>[ Studio MX/MX2004 | PHP/ASP | SQL | XHTML/CSS | XML | Actionscript | Web Accessibility | MX Extensibility ]</font id=size1>