Web applications running on server side, database driven or standalone are created in different programming languages. The most commonly used are PHP (Hypertext Preprocesor) and ASP (Active Server Pages).

PHP is an open source technology that can be used to create applications that run for free on any Apache web server. Even more, PHP is a flexible and portable language and applications programmed in PHP are easy to be implemented or ported on many operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, MacOS and Solaris. Active Server Pages is a technology created by Microsoft and is available mainly on Windows servers which require a commercial license.

As a consequence, the web hosting prices on Windows servers are higher than those corresponding to Linux web hosting. There are ASP versions for other operating systems, like Linux and Solaris, but even in this situation, the server software is not free. The main programming languages used in ASP are Visual Basic and Javascript, but Perl, Python and others could be implemented using the appropriate modules.

PHP language is similar to C++ from the synthax point of view and is very easy to learn. There are many PHP coding options for solving a simple task as compared to ASP. The PHP code is less complex and more compact than ASP. The speed of execution for PHP code is also higher than ASP. The tools needed for PHP development are also free or open source. PHP has also many built in functions, libraries and classes as compared to ASP and in this way PHP programming language allows a quicker development of web applications.

PHP applications which have a database backend can be made using various databases, such as MySQL. ASP can connect through ODBC to various databases also, but the application performance is lower. The performance and stability of PHP/MySQL applications is demonstrated by the presence of a high number of such server side applications used on a very large scale with notable results.

You can try to discover the PHP languages features by using one of the hundreds of tutorials available on Internet in order to see how easy it is to deploy in a short time any web application that will have both performance and stability with minimum amount of code.