For any company to succeed in the market, it needs to maintain its digital presence. Though social media remains the right place to gain some attention, it is impossible to create a brand image without an official web page. As such, businesses hire firms offering web development services to get their website designed, which would enable them to get as much traction as possible.
Web development includes the process of developing a website, which can range from creating a single simple page to a sequence of complex pages. Web development covers several actions, including web design, programming, content creation, network security tasks, and server-side & client-side scripting. Several technologies are available in the market for creating a website. Among them, to program custom functionality or business logic of the website, a few of the popular programming languages developers use are PHP, ASP.Net, Ruby, C#, Perl, Java, C/C++, Python or ColdFusion.
In 2023, as per W3tech’s study, in the distribution of server-side programming languages on websites, 77.3% use PHP while 6.9% use ASP.NET.
| Parameter | PHP | .NET |
| Framework Usage | Larvel, Symphony, Yii, Codeigniter, CakePHP | .NET Core, ASP.NET, .NET Framework |
| Advantages | Fast, flexible, strong community | Versatile, comprehensive, secure |
| Performance | Fast loading, quick data processing | Fast, caching, dynamic user experience |
| Security |
Strong measures, data validation |
Robust security features |
| Community Support | Active PHP community | Active .NET developer community |
| Ease of Development | Readable syntax, easy maintenance | Flexible deployment, rich tools |
| Libraries | Extensive support for libraries | Comprehensive class library |
| Cross-platform | Compatible with various OS and servers | Cross-platform capabilities (Core) |
| Usage Focus | Versatile Applications | Diverse project types |
PHP maintains its lead with 77.3% of websites relying on it, showcasing its enduring popularity. PHP has consistently evolved, enhancing features, performance, and usability. PHP 8.3, has many new features.
Here's a quick list of what's new:
In short, PHP 8.3 makes coding better by fixing issues, adding new tools, and making errors easier to understand.
.NET 8 appeals to developers seeking to future-proof their applications, offering a solid foundation for modern development. .NET 8 boasts improved performance, ensuring efficient application execution. The framework includes enhanced diagnostic capabilities, simplifying troubleshooting, and optimization.
A list of some new features:
Check Out Our Blog on What are the Top .NET Framework Trends in 2023?
Both PHP 8.3 and .NET 8 offer valuable advancements that cater to different aspects of web development. PHP 8.3 brings enhanced error handling, improved functionality, and new tools to streamline coding and make troubleshooting more straightforward. On the other hand, .NET provides a robust framework for developing diverse applications, including web, desktop, and mobile, with a strong focus on performance, security, and scalability.
What are the factors that convince businesses to give priority to these programming languages over others?
Fast website loading is important for retaining the audience. In case the website is slow, users refrain from visiting the website again. Web development with PHP ensures rapid turnaround time with its quick data processing features, seamless integration with various management systems and outstanding customization capability.
Similarly, .NET offers early binding as well as a just-in-time compilation, which ensures better performance along with caching services and native optimization. Besides, ASP.Net enables you to run a smart client app model, which can execute without any communication with the server and the network. It results in dynamic user experience.
Cutting down on development time and cost are crucial factors while adopting languages for web development services. Failure in this area is the primary reason of most of the project delays in their schedules. To reduce the development time of their project, enterprises give priority to PHP and .Net.
Being an object-oriented language and with features of reusable components, PHP and .NET languages ensure faster time to market. The various PHP frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, & Joomla, offers secure and fast development in certain areas. Besides, PHP was intentionally optimized for developing various web apps quickly.
With reusable components, .NET offers developers a seamless coding experience by applying accepted rules while preventing from the hassle of lengthy code.
For business, if the time spent on web development decreases, the business will start to receive ROI earlier.
It is always best to choose programming languages that include a community to help them grow and address issues. Languages with an active forum, wikis, and tutorials are likely to be more popular than languages without similar offerings.
Both PHP and .NET include a large community support with experienced developers. PHP has been in the web development services for quite a while; hence, there is no surprise for the availability of a huge community of PHP developers.
Similarly, .NET includes a large community of .NET developers and unites engineers from SMEs and large-scale companies. This means any issues in these languages during development can be solved with the support of community members.
Programmers feel comfortable with a language which is easy to maintain. In this ever-changing environment, business needs change randomly; hence, it is advisable to pick the language that can be updated at any stage.
The main reason why we use PHP for web development is its ease of development and maintenance. Due to its easily decipherable syntax, the code can be freely changed and modified. As there is no problem in updating and maintaining PHP-based web development services, they can be adjusted with new business requirements.
One-step ahead to easy maintenance .NET enables flexible deployment as well. Another major benefit of using .NET is that it enables you to run multiple .NET core versions parallelly on the same system to support different projects as well as continuously perform deployment tasks.
The choice of the programming language should also depend on the available debugging tools. You can debug PHP codes using one of several debugging tools like ZendDebugger and Xdebug. PHP enables you to use various loggers available when it comes to logging debug messages. There are various PHP debugging techniques to assist you in saving time when coding. Error reporting, print statement and plug-ins like PHPeclipse to highlight syntax errors are a few of them. Further, the default error handling as well as custom error handling in PHP is quite simple.
With Visual Studio IDE, .NET developers can have access to the rich set of tools for detecting bugs. VS Code, DbgCLR, and CorDbg are a few examples of .NET debugging tools. The visual studio includes error-handling techniques for .NET. Its debugging process comprises adding breakpoints to the code to pause the program execution when an error is diagnosed.
In web development services, the number of the standard libraries is the critical factor that differentiates a good web programming language. It plays a vital role in simplifying as well as accelerating the data processing capability of the language. With several, pre-installed libraries, PHP provides extensive support for regular expressions, HTTP fetching, database drivers and URL parsing. As the libraries are simple to use and implement, it ensures additional features to improve the entire web development process.
With a wide-ranging class library developed by Microsoft, .net gives equal competition to PHP. Its Framework Class Library (FCL) includes a set of reusable classes, interfaces and value types, which are tightly integrated with Common Language Runtime. Bcrypt.Net-Core, Smidge, FluentEmail, and Autocomplete are the names of some .net core libraries.
While looking for web development services, security is the top concern for any enterprise. Understanding the importance of the same, web development service providers choose the language, which ensures the highest level of security for their web development solutions. Both PHP and .Net are secured. The PHP security prevents the attackers to gain unauthorized access to your website’s data through validating user input as well as some sanitization techniques.
.NET includes simple but flexible identity-based security features. Code Access Security, Configuration, Authentication, Exception Handling, and Communication Security are some active security features.
While developing a website or web app, programmers typically consider the platform on which it will run. They should function identically across all browsers and devices to offer desired user experience. Another primary reason why we use PHP for web development is its versatility. The PHP programs are compatible with all platforms from Windows, Linux and UNIX to Mac OS. Moreover, it supports servers like iPlanet, Netscape, Microsoft IIS, Apache, Xitami and Caudium.
Likewise, .NET core ensures the cross-platform .NET implementation, which allows your code to run on OS X, Linux, and Windows. If you are writing in any .NET language like Visual Basic, C# or F#, your code will function well on the each of the compatible OSs. This enables the enterprise to reach a wide variety of platforms residing within the .NET ecosystem.
That is why PHP and .NET is often chosen for web applications; it enables companies to leverage the existing infrastructure with nominal expenditures.
If you're looking to harness the capabilities of .NET, hire .NET developers or PHP developers who possess the skills and expertise to create dynamic and reliable software solutions that align with your business objectives.