[VB.Net] PacketBuffer Class

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

Grok, that was one of my joke posts. But it gets the point across.

PHP owns. Why!? I'll compare to ASP, since you're a Microsoftie I'll assume ASP is using vbscript unless otherwise noted.

1) It's one language you have to learn. Although vbscript is defacto for ASP, some people use other languages for it, thus forcing you to learn a new language or adapt to a different one when joining an ASP project.

2) It's syntactic sugar makes it great for database code. You just call mysql_fetch_array() and you get a key-value pairing of the database.

3) It's freakin easy A lot of really stupid people on this forum have picked it up and write really good code in it.

4) There's way more support and way more hosts run it (at least our kind of hosts, I don't know about businesses)

5. Nice syntactic sugar with the $var being able to be inserted in strings

6) Its familiar to me, coming from a C/Java background, and it's familiar to perl/tcl programmers too.

7) Its syntax is easier to read from popular opinion, compared to vbs. Please refer to the BASIC vs C syntax wars.

Runs on all platforms, with full support on their website

9) Easily accessible documentation, goto www.php.net and type in the function name

10) Includes OOP, but discourages its use. Who would use OOP in a website!? Seems crazy to me, but I could be wrong.

11) No ActiveX! HURRAY!

Downsides of PHP:

1) Non-portable database code, sucks for porting. Example, I'm thinking about switching all of my sites I've designed to pgsql because it's way easier to use, but I have to recompile PHP and rewrite some code.

2) OOP coding blows.

3) A bit cryptic to read at first, but after getting used to it, C/perl programmers can read it very easily very quickly.

4) register_globals is sometimes on and sometimes off, and in procedures I have to use global [var].

As far as performance goes, I've seen several benchmarks, and realized that they're so close it doesn't matter too much. It's usually limited by the DBMS.

Vs. other server-side scripting:

JSP: What a really horrible idea. Why would anyone use JSP? Java isn't suited to writing web sites. JDBC sucks, it's strongly typed and forces you to catch exceptions and use OOP, and you have to COMPILE! your web pages. Not to mention there's a million versions and they're all a bitch to install. No thanks, I'd rather use ASP.

Java Servlets: Worse than JSP, because you can't embed HTML as easily as JSP. Basically, it's JSP but worse.

Perl: Too many single characters that do weird stuff. It's pretty standard though, so I don't know.

Python: Pretty ownage language, but I like the ones where you can easily embed HTML.

On the VB sucks topic, I'd like to note that VB only has the array data structure, and a bizzare Collection object.

[Camel]

9) Easily accessible documentation, goto www.php.net and type in the function name

www.php.net/<function_name> is total ownage

[Banana fanna fo fanna]

www.php.net/<function_name> is total ownage

Whoa, didn't know that was possible!

[Camel]

Whoa, didn't know that was possible!

sure; map your 404s to a search script server-side