Can anyone tell me the difference and which is best for a database-driven e-commerce website design. :help: :confused:

.NET potenitaly is more secure, as it runs as compiled code, where as PHP is a script. Both scale equally well, but both are only as good the programmer.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/hull_asp.html

Joel

You can of course precompile your PHP as well, and ultimately use it as part of a wider .MONO development environment.

To get a quick and dirty data driven site up and running from scratch, PHP is a no-brainer.

My feeling of the two (as mainly a PHP user) is that PHP is more open, faster to get into and much more flexible (oh and also usually much cheaper to host :) ) but also gives you more opportunities to mess things up badly!!!

A poorly designed and written .NET application can still be insecure, though.

I've found that .NET requires more resources than PHP on the server, but that may just be me!

Joe

I haven't used PHP much but I really like .NET. As I do a lot of Access database programming I really like the event driven nature which is quite similar to programming Access forms in a way.
Combined with the free Visual Studio Express Editions you can throw a fairly sophisticated application together in quite a short time.

.NET does not produce W3C valid HTML from it's built in components without a lot of hacking, so if this is important (and it really should be in this day and age) then .NET will take more work.

If you don't know either C# or PHP then I think PHP is easier to learn.

But in the end there are commercial sites written in both.

Hey thanks people, although this is all somewhat techy for a non-techy person!

So, if I want a e-commerce database driven website built, which should i go for? The designer is asking which one do i want and i don't know the difference but i want what is right and what is best all round.