Ananda Sim <An*******@gmail.com.invalid> wrote in
news:43***********************@news.optusnet.com.a u:
ColdFusion is so simple that one can produce something in an hour
from newbie status, php is the most common cost-less language.
Classic ASP is always there and there is ASP.NET.
I loved CF, but couldn't find anywhere to host it that didn't cost a
fortune.
So, I switched to PHP, which is much harder for me as an Access
developer, but still pretty easy.
Also, it's so nicely integrated with MySQL that it's very easy to
do, with lots of functionality, and pretty darned good documentation
for both.
Now, I'm no big fan of MySQL, but as a way of getting your feet wet,
Apache+PHP+MySQL is a pretty darned powerful development platform,
and is free from top to bottom. You can also run your testbed on
Windows and port the code to a production server running Linux or
whatever without having to worry about it.
The only things to worry about are version differences between your
testbed environment and the deployment environment. PHP in
particular is really bad about breaking working code with minor
point upgrades, so it's pretty important that you use the same
version.
I've explicitly never learned ASP because:
1. at the time I was choosing a server-side scripting language to
learn, NT-based hosting was more expensive than the alternatives.
2. it's intimately tied in with IIS, whereas PHP and CF, for
instance, can run on any web server.
3. I believe it's better for the software ecosystem to use multiple
plastforms in different environments. That means that I use non-MS
products wherever it's workable, and in the case of web development,
I think it's vastly preferable.
--
David W. Fenton
http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
dfenton at bway dot net
http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc 
