ASP and PHP

ASP is the historic name given to Microsoft’s Active Server Pages.

Typically, if the web server is of the IIS variant, it will utilise Microsoft’s ASP.NET module, but if the web server is an Apace variant, it will utilise the open-source PHP module.

ASP.NET is the replacement set of technologies for Microsoft’s earlier offering of ASP. It is a web development technology capable of building complex web applications, including web forms and dynamic websites.

ASP pages were usually written using Visual Basic, a proprietary language developed by Microsoft where ASP.NET is a framework of many languages that share a common language runtime environment.

PHP is the open-source alternative to ASP and began life in 1994 when the programmer Rasmus Lerdorf created a set of Perl scripts he called ‘Personal Home Page Tools’ to maintain his personal homepage.

He rewrote these scripts as Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries in C, extending them to add the ability to work with Web forms and to communicate with databases and called this implementation "Personal Home Page/Forms Interpreter" or PHP/FI.

Lerdorf released PHP/FI as ‘Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0’ publicly on June 8, 1995, to accelerate bug location and improve the code. This release already had the basic functionality that PHP still has today. The term PHP nowadays is a recursive bacronym for PHP:HyperText pre-processor.

PHP, then, is a cross-platform language that’s widely used across the web and enables its users to build complex web applications.

You will see both ASP.NET and PHP deployed in modern, interactive web sites and applications.