Thread

Hi All, I’ve had this dilemma for a while.
My place of employment uses mostly Classic ASP and asp.net V.1 on IIS 6 servers.
They may be looking to upgrade soon, and IIS is supporting PHP more and more through fastCGI.
My problem is this, the boss would also like to do PHP, I would nearly kill to do it but I am only a lowly designer with minimal code monkey skills, so don’t be fooled by my newly created screen name of codehead 😊...
So the only hold out is the programmer and delegated server admin who is entrenched in asp.net. How can I win him over more??
His reasoning is we can’t support PHP on the server. I can be happy running EE/Ci and only worrying about tweaks when necessary, where he is used to developing things from the ground up.
Does anyone have any parallel knowledge of PHP, classic asp, and asp.net.
IS there a user group of any kind that really discusses both, probably not so much?
we’ve lost out on project bids already because of no real out-of-the-box solutions to go with.

Last summer PHP was installed for a possible project/partnership but as ISAPI, which I understand now is problematic, we were excited about it, but just as quickly the project disappeared and any talk of PHP. I’ve since learned CGI would of been the way to go, all sort of foreign to me.
Looking for accomplices 😉 Don’t tell anyone you talked to me here :coolsmirk:

I have spent the last five years working for the same employer.

We started with a classic ASP / MS SQL Server application.

We then hired another programmer and worked for about 1.5 years on a .NET application which totally failed.

Meanwhile, the classic ASP application is still chugging along.

Recently, I convinced my boss to open up a little, and we now have a development server running Ubuntu, and I am developing our newest project in PHP and CI.

My opinion is that classic ASP and PHP 4 are a lot more similar than I had thought. Clunky object / class stuff but once the code is working, it just keeps on working.

.NET I hated. But the thing is, the reason there are flame wars over technology is because different mindsets embrace different coding styles. .NET to me is boring and bass-ackwards. CI and other FOSS frameworks resonate much more strongly with my personal style.

As an interesting aside, .NET now has an MVC style of development that can be used, because their default method is just not as popular.

Given the choice, I would never use MS technology again. Even though it took me a little more time to set up our Linux development server than our .NET development server, deployment to production is much faster, and since there is no compile-cycle, I find that development is faster.

Though I do miss the intellisense that Visual Studio gives you, and the visual designer was interesting.

Going back to different styles, what it came down to for me is that when I read Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, I understood that .NET uses a different pattern than most opensource frameworks.

Which explained why I disliked it to a large degree… It was - by default - forcing me to develop in a way that was different than what I felt was the “right” way.

Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss this in more detail or on IM or phone.

Thanks Jay, I’m glad at least one person was able to identify with my predicament. I love the design work I get to do but…

I was thinking over lunch that, I had mentioned numerous times I’m looking at the EE CMS and threatening to develop a cool site. Now with the entrance of Ci into that mix, maybe it would give the programmer something to sink his teeth into, and someplace to dig into, as you say FOSS. So I should invite the programmer to check out Ci.
I’ve looked at Visual studio myself and attended one MS event when the Expression Studio launched, frankly I couldn’t make heads nor tales of it. On top of that we don’t have asp.net 2.0 so anything it had to offer we couldn’t use, double-whammy. That one conference convinced me if I want to do any real developing it will have to be PHP. I can see how the programmer might feel threatened if we move to PHP maybe, or just doesn’t want to learn a new technology when he is comfortable with dotNet. The problem is the cost of the MS licenses, is part of the reason we are running the old IIS6, is my lowly designer guess.

My best hope is maybe IIS8 will have enough to offer that there may be some in-house server upgrades, and with it PHP pretty much ready to go.

From a productivity/profitability standpoint, specialization is a good thing.

I primarily work in php and asp.net with C#, and I haven’t mastered either. I’m slowed down by procedural and syntax errors when switching between the two. It’s not good for productivity, but I like the variety. I also like to apply what I’ve learned from php frameworks to asp.net, and vice-versa.

If I was your boss, I’d hire a php programmer and host php off-site using LAMP. Specialize in one technology, and borrow ideas from others.

Thanks Rick, running PHP off-site is something I’ve considered. I have a dev host that is working well for me.
I’m not sure the boss would want to be tied down to remote hosting, but for the first client or two, I think it makes sense. Having some knowledge of the remote hosts specs, and just what glitches we might encounter would be good knowledge of pitfalls to avoid on our own servers.
A lamp setup would be great for me, to be able to take advantage of rewriting URL’s and htaccess, etc.
There’s probably room for a profit margin on administering even a remote account, call it reselling.

I’ve never understood hosting in-house or reselling.

Third party remote hosting is cheap. There is no need to hire a system admin, there is 24 hour support, and if anything goes wrong it doesn’t reflect poorly on your company.

When I have to develop for companies with in-house hosting, I’ve learned to charge more due to no support, poor accessibility, and unforseen problems. I once spent 2 days trying to figure out why I couldn’t get file uploads to work reliably. It turned out to be a server firewall issue.

Makes sense hosting and the monthly revenue is a big part of the picture sometimes though.
Have you read Kurt’s post on Total Cost of Ownership I, there is a bit of a formula in there to help me sort things out and going remote hosting, pros and cons.
thanks again.