[AccessD] Learning .Net -- PHP Instead?

Anyone interested in following Ken's lead here is invited to visit
www.artfulsoftware.com and investigate our chapters on PHP and TheUsual().
Arthur

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Kenneth Ismert <kismert at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you are interested in Web programming, I would suggest PHP. Per unit of
> effort, I think most VBA programmers would get further with PHP than with
> ASPX, especially if you are starting out from scratch.
>
> I'm developing a SOAP-based web service that will be used by Access clients
> running the COM-based SOAP Library 3.0. The server backend is being written
> in PHP, currently running under a local IIS7 development server. It is
> stupid-simple to implement a SOAP server using PHP's built-in library. It
> was lots harder getting the VBA side to work than the PHP side. (The real
> challenge was getting a WSDL specification that both sides could agree on,
> but that is a separate topic.)
>
> PHP Plusses:
>
> * Of all open-source languages, PHP is the closest to VBA in it's feel and
> philosophy -- a pragmatic language that lets you get results fast
> * PHP 5.2+ works very well with Windows -- it installs with little fuss
> under IIS7, and has native drivers for SQL Server
> * The upcoming release, 5.3, offers some very nice language enhancements,
> like namespaces, late static binding, and closures. It even adds goto!
> These
> features bring it up to rough parity with scripting languages like Python
> or
> Ruby, and make it a much more expressive language than VBA.
> * There is an enormous ecosystem of open-source libraries, IDEs, CMS
> sytems,
> and MVC frameworks to choose from.
> * Projects developed under Windows/IIS should work with little or no
> changes
> under Linux/Apache.
>
> PHP Drawbacks:
>
> * PHP is a web-specific language. If you want something general-purpose,
> use
> something else.
> * PHP's libraries are extensive and rapidly improving, but it doesn't have
> the monolithic library integration that .NET enjoys with the CLR.
> * Comprehensive, transparent support for Unicode is still lacking, as it is
> with most scripting languages. PHP 6 will rectify this.
>
> -Ken
> aseadvisors.com <http://www.databaseadvisors.com>
>